Effects of Population Initialization on Differential Evolution for Large Scale Optimization

This work provides an in-depth investigation of the effects of population initialization on Differential Evolution (DE) for dealing with large scale optimization problems. Firstly, we conduct a statistical parameter sensitive analysis to study the effects of DE's control parameters on its performance of solving large scale problems. This study reveals the optimal parameter configurations which can lead to the statistically superior performance over the CEC-2013 large-scale test problems. Thus identified optimal parameter configurations interestingly favour much larger population sizes while agreeing with the other parameter settings compared to the most commonly employed parameter configuration. Based on one of the identified optimal configurations and the most commonly used configuration, which only differ in the population size, we investigate the influence of various population initialization techniques on DE's performance. This study indicates that initialization plays a more crucial role in DE with a smaller population size. However, this observation might be the result of insufficient convergence due to the use of a large population size under the limited computational budget, which deserve more investigations.