A parameter adaptive differential evolution based on depth information

Differential Evolution (DE) was an easy-coding and efficient stochastic algorithm for global optimization, and the whole optimization process simulates biological evolution. Superior individuals of the population that were suitable for the environment were retained during the evolution, and consequently the tolerable solutions could be obtained in the end. Despite the excellent performance of DE algorithm, there were still some shortcomings. For example, the general performance of DE depended largely on mutation strategy and control parameters, how to design the appropriate control parameters and mutation strategy were difficult tasks. Here a novel DE variant was proposed to overcome these shortcomings. By incorporating the depth information of previous generations of populations, a better diversity of trial vector candidates could be secured during the evolution process. Moreover, the thought that successful parameters should be retained to guide the update of themselves during the evolution was also incorporated into the novel algorithm. The optimization performance of the new proposed DE variant was verified under CEC 2013 test suit containing 28 benchmarks, and the results showed its competitiveness with several state-of-the-art DE variants.