Improving Population-Based Algorithms with Fitness Deterioration
This work presents a new hybrid approach for supporting sequential niching strategies called Cluster Supported Fitness Deterioration (CSFD). Sequential niching is one of the most promising evolutionary strategies for analyzing multimodal global optimization problems in the continuous domains embedded in the vector metric spaces. In each iteration CSFD performs the clustering of the random sample by OPTICS algorithm and then deteriorates the fitness on the area occupied by clusters. The selection pressure pushes away the next-step sample (population) from the basins of attraction of minimizers already recognized, speeding up finding the new ones. The main advantages of CSFD are low memory an computational complexity even in case of large dimensional problems and high accuracy of deterioration obtained by the flexible cluster definition delivered by OPTICS. The paper contains the broad discussion of niching strategies, detailed definition of CSFD and the series of the simple comparative tests.