Memetic Computing 

About: Memetic Computing is an academic journal published by Springer Science+Business Media. The journal publishes majorly in the area(s): Evolutionary algorithm & Memetic algorithm. It has an ISSN identifier of 1865-9284. Over the lifetime, 374 publications have been published receiving 7984 citations.

Moth search algorithm: a bio-inspired metaheuristic algorithm for global optimization problems

Abstract: Phototaxis, signifying movement of an organism towards or away from a source of light, is one of the most representative features for moths. It has recently been shown that one of the characteristics of moths has been the propensity to follow Levy flights. Inspired by the phototaxis and Levy flights of the moths, a new kind of metaheuristic algorithm, called moth search (MS) algorithm, is developed in the present work. In nature, moths are a family insects associated with butterflies belonging to the order Lepidoptera. In MS method, the best moth individual is viewed as the light source. Some moths that are close to the fittest one always display an inclination to fly around their own positions in the form of Levy flights. On the contrary, due to phototaxis, the moths that are comparatively far from the fittest one will tend to fly towards the best one directly in a big step. These two features correspond to the processes of exploitation and exploration of any metaheuristic optimization method. The phototaxis and Levy flights of the moths can be used to build up a general-purpose optimization method. In order to demonstrate the superiority of its performance, the MS method is further compared with five other state-of-the-art metaheuristic optimization algorithms through an array of experiments on fourteen basic benchmarks, eleven IEEE CEC 2005 complicated benchmarks and seven IEEE CEC 2011 real world problems. The results clearly demonstrate that MS significantly outperforms five other methods on most test functions and engineering cases.

Spider Monkey Optimization algorithm for numerical optimization

Abstract: Swarm intelligence is one of the most promising area for the researchers in the field of numerical optimization. Researchers have developed many algorithms by simulating the swarming behavior of various creatures like ants, honey bees, fish, birds and the findings are very motivating. In this paper, a new approach for numerical optimization is proposed by modeling the foraging behavior of spider monkeys. Spider monkeys have been categorized as fission–fusion social structure based animals. The animals which follow fission–fusion social systems, split themselves from large to smaller groups and vice-versa based on the scarcity or availability of food. The proposed swarm intelligence approach is named as Spider Monkey Optimization (SMO) algorithm and can broadly be classified as an algorithm inspired by intelligent foraging behavior of fission–fusion social structure based animals.

Chemical Reaction Optimization: a tutorial

Abstract: Chemical Reaction Optimization (CRO) is a recently established metaheuristics for optimization, inspired by the nature of chemical reactions. A chemical reaction is a natural process of transforming the unstable substances to the stable ones. In microscopic view, a chemical reaction starts with some unstable molecules with excessive energy. The molecules interact with each other through a sequence of elementary reactions. At the end, they are converted to those with minimum energy to support their existence. This property is embedded in CRO to solve optimization problems. CRO can be applied to tackle problems in both the discrete and continuous domains. We have successfully exploited CRO to solve a broad range of engineering problems, including the quadratic assignment problem, neural network training, multimodal continuous problems, etc. The simulation results demonstrate that CRO has superior performance when compared with other existing optimization algorithms. This tutorial aims to assist the readers in implementing CRO to solve their problems. It also serves as a technical overview of the current development of CRO and provides potential future research directions.

Scale factor local search in differential evolution

Abstract: This paper proposes the scale factor local search differential evolution (SFLSDE). The SFLSDE is a differential evolution (DE) based memetic algorithm which employs, within a self-adaptive scheme, two local search algorithms. These local search algorithms aim at detecting a value of the scale factor corresponding to an offspring with a high performance, while the generation is executed. The local search algorithms thus assist in the global search and generate offspring with high performance which are subsequently supposed to promote the generation of enhanced solutions within the evolutionary framework. Despite its simplicity, the proposed algorithm seems to have very good performance on various test problems. Numerical results are shown in order to justify the use of a double local search instead of a single search. In addition, the SFLSDE has been compared with a standard DE and three other modern DE based metaheuristic for a large and varied set of test problems. Numerical results are given for relatively low and high dimensional cases. A statistical analysis of the optimization results has been included in order to compare the results in terms of final solution detected and convergence speed. The efficiency of the proposed algorithm seems to be very high especially for large scale problems and complex fitness landscapes.

Genetic programming for feature construction and selection in classification on high-dimensional data

Abstract: Classification on high-dimensional data with thousands to tens of thousands of dimensions is a challenging task due to the high dimensionality and the quality of the feature set. The problem can be addressed by using feature selection to choose only informative features or feature construction to create new high-level features. Genetic programming (GP) using a tree-based representation can be used for both feature construction and implicit feature selection. This work presents a comprehensive study to investigate the use of GP for feature construction and selection on high-dimensional classification problems. Different combinations of the constructed and/or selected features are tested and compared on seven high-dimensional gene expression problems, and different classification algorithms are used to evaluate their performance. The results show that the constructed and/or selected feature sets can significantly reduce the dimensionality and maintain or even increase the classification accuracy in most cases. The cases with overfitting occurred are analysed via the distribution of features. Further analysis is also performed to show why the constructed feature can achieve promising classification performance.