Clustering Center-based Differential Evolution

In recent years, center-based sampling has demonstrated impressive results to enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of meta-heuristic algorithms. The strategy of the center-based sampling can be utilized at either or both the operation and/or population level. Despite the overall efficiency of the center-based sampling in population-based algorithms, utilization at operation level requires customizing the strategy for a specific algorithm which degrades the scheme's generalization. In this paper, we have proposed a population-level center-based sampling method which is operation independent and correspondingly can be embedded in any population-based optimization algorithm. In this study, we applied the proposed scheme for Differential Evolution (DE) algorithm to enhance the exploration and exploitation capabilities of the algorithm. We cluster candidate solutions and inject the centroid-based samples into the population to increase the overall quality of the population and thus decrease the risk of premature convergence and stagnation. By a high chance, the center-based samples are effectively generated in the promising regions of the search space. The proposed method has been benchmarked by employing CEC-2017 benchmark test suite on dimensions 30, 50, and 100. The results clearly indicate the superiority of the proposed scheme, and a detailed results analysis is provided.