Hybrid differential evolution based on fuzzy C-means clustering

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a hybrid Differential Evolution (DE) algorithm based on the fuzzy C-means clustering algorithm, referred to as FCDE. The fuzzy C-means clustering algorithm is incorporated with DE to utilize the information of the population efficiently, and hence it can generate good solutions and enhance the performance of the original DE. In addition, the population-based algorithmgenerator is adopted to efficiently update the population with the clustering offspring. In order to test the performance of our approach, 13 high-dimensional benchmark functions of diverse complexities are employed. The results show that our approach is effective and efficient. Compared with other state-of-the-art DE approaches, our approach performs better, or at least comparably, in terms of the quality of the final solutions and the reduction of the number of fitness function evaluations (NFFEs).