A recent set of overused population-based methods have been published in recent years. Despite their popularity, most of them have uncertain, immature performance, partially done verifications, similar overused metaphors, similar immature exploration and exploitation components and operations, and an insecure tradeoff between exploration and exploitation trends in most of the new real-world cases. Therefore, all users need to extensively modify and adjust their operations based on main evolutionary methods to reach faster convergence, more stable balance, and high-quality results. To move the optimization community one step ahead toward more focus on performance rather than change of metaphor, a general-purpose population-based optimization technique called Hunger Games Search (HGS) is proposed in this research with a simple structure, special stability features and very competitive performance to realize the solutions of both constrained and unconstrained problems more effectively. The proposed HGS is designed according to the hunger-driven activities and behavioural choice of animals. This dynamic, fitness-wise search method follows a simple concept of “Hunger” as the most crucial homeostatic motivation and reason for behaviours, decisions, and actions in the life of all animals to make the process of optimization more understandable and consistent for new users and decision-makers. The Hunger Games Search incorporates the concept of hunger into the feature process; in other words, an adaptive weight based on the concept of hunger is designed and employed to simulate the effect of hunger on each search step. It follows the computationally logical rules (games) utilized by almost all animals and these rival activities and games are often adaptive evolutionary by securing higher chances of survival and food acquisition. This method's main feature is its dynamic nature, simple structure, and high performance in terms of convergence and acceptable quality of solutions, proving to be more efficient than the current optimization methods. The effectiveness of HGS was verified by comparing HGS with a comprehensive set of popular and advanced algorithms on 23 well-known optimization functions and the IEEE CEC 2014 benchmark test suite. Also, the HGS was applied to several engineering problems to demonstrate its applicability. The results validate the effectiveness of the proposed optimizer compared to popular essential optimizers, several advanced variants of the existing methods, and several CEC winners and powerful differential evolution (DE)-based methods abbreviated as LSHADE, SPS_L_SHADE_EIG, LSHADE_cnEpSi, SHADE, SADE, MPEDE, and JDE methods in handling many single-objective problems. We designed this open-source population-based method to be a standard tool for optimization in different areas of artificial intelligence and machine learning with several new exploratory and exploitative features, high performance, and high optimization capacity. The method is very flexible and scalable to be extended to fit more form of optimization cases in both structural aspects and application sides. This paper's source codes, supplementary files, Latex and office source files, sources of plots, a brief version and pseudocode, and an open-source software toolkit for solving optimization problems with Hunger Games Search and online web service for any question, feedback, suggestion, and idea on HGS algorithm will be available to the public at https://aliasgharheidari.com/HGS.html .

Hunger games search: Visions, conception, implementation, deep analysis, perspectives, and towards performance shifts

https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/s42235-021-0050-y.pdf

The Colony Predation Algorithm

Towards augmented kernel extreme learning models for bankruptcy prediction: Algorithmic behavior and comprehensive analysis

Moth flame optimization (MFO) is a swarm-based algorithm with mediocre performance and marginal originality proposed in recent years. It tried to simulate the fantasy navigation mode of moth lateral positioning. The basic MFO has no specific, deep strategies in different periods of the algorithm and a fragile evolutionary basis, which may lead to the problem of falling into local optimum and slow convergence trend. Therefore, this paper introduces a double adaptive weight mechanism into the MFO algorithm, termed as WEMFO, to boost the search capability of the basic MFO and provide a more efficient tool for optimization purposes. The proposed WEMFO adjusts the search strategy adaptively in different periods of the algorithm, making it more flexible between global search (diversification) and local search (intensification). The WEMFO algorithm is compared with some illustrious metaheuristic solvers and advanced metaheuristic methods developed in recent years on thirty benchmark functions. The experimental results expose that the developed WEMFO has apparent compensations in terms of convergence speed and solution accuracy. Moreover, this paper analyzes the diversity and balance of WEMFO and applies the algorithm to several engineering problems. The experimental results show that the WEMFO algorithm has good performance in engineering problems. Additionally, the proposed WEMFO was also applied to train Kernel Extreme Learning Machine (KELM), the resultant optimized WEMFO-KELM model was applied to six clinical disease classification problems. By comparing with MFO-KELM and other five classification models, the experimental results showed that the proposed algorithm had shown better performance in practical problems. An online guide for the algorithm in this research WEMFO and proposed classifier WEMFO-KELM will be publicly available at https://aliasgharheidari.com .

Double adaptive weights for stabilization of moth flame optimizer: Balance analysis, engineering cases, and medical diagnosis

Breast cancer (BC) is one of the primary causes of cancer death among women. Early detection of BC allows patients to receive appropriate treatment, thus increasing the possibility of survival. In this work, a new deep-learning (DL) model based on the transfer-learning (TL) technique is developed to efficiently assist in the automatic detection and diagnosis of the BC suspected area based on two techniques namely 80–20 and cross-validation. DL architectures are modeled to be problem-specific. TL uses the knowledge gained during solving one problem in another relevant problem. In the proposed model, the features are extracted from the mammographic image analysis- society (MIAS) dataset using a pre-trained convolutional neural network (CNN) architecture such as Inception V3, ResNet50, Visual Geometry Group networks (VGG)-19, VGG-16, and Inception-V2 ResNet. Six evaluation metrics for evaluating the performance of the proposed model in terms of accuracy, sensitivity, specificity, precision, F-score, and area under the ROC curve (AUC) has been chosen. Experimental results show that the TL of the VGG16 model is powerful for BC diagnosis by classifying the mammogram breast images with overall accuracy, sensitivity, specificity, precision, F-score, and AUC of 98.96%, 97.83%, 99.13%, 97.35%, 97.66%, and 0.995, respectively for 80–20 method and 98.87%, 97.27%, 98.2%, 98.84%, 98.04%, and 0.993 for 10-fold cross-validation method.

/pdf/a-novel-deep-learning-model-for-automatic-detection-and-6978h97i3w.pdf

A Novel Deep-Learning Model for Automatic Detection and Classification of Breast Cancer Using the Transfer-Learning Technique

Feature selection is a required preprocess stage in most of the data mining tasks. This paper presents an improved Harris hawks optimization (HHO) to find high-quality solutions for global optimization and feature selection tasks. This method is an efficient optimizer inspired by the behaviors of Harris' hawks, which try to catch the rabbits. In some cases, the original version tends to stagnate to the local optimum solutions. Hence, a novel HHO called IHHO is proposed by embedding the salp swarm algorithm (SSA) into the original HHO to improve the search ability of the optimizer and expand the application fields. The update stage in the HHO optimizer, which is performed to update each hawk, is divided into three phases: adjusting population based on SSA to generate SSA-based population, generating hybrid individuals according to SSA-based individual and HHO-based individual, and updating search agent in the light of greedy selection and HHO’s mechanisms. A large group of experiments on many functions is carried out to investigate the efficacy of the proposed optimizer. Based on the overall results, the proposed IHHO can provide a faster convergence speed and maintain a better balance between exploration and exploitation. Moreover, according to the proposed continuous IHHO, a more stable binary IHHO is also constructed as a wrapper-based feature selection (FS) approach. We compare the resulting binary IHHO with other FS methods using well-known benchmark datasets provided by UCI. The experimental results reveal that the proposed IHHO has better accuracy rates over other compared wrapper FS methods. Overall research and analysis confirm the improvement in IHHO because of the suitable exploration capability of SSA.

https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/s00366-020-01028-5.pdf

Yanan Zhang

Papers

Boosted binary Harris hawks optimizer and feature selection

Towards augmented kernel extreme learning models for bankruptcy prediction: Algorithmic behavior and comprehensive analysis