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The Whale Optimization Algorithm (WOA) is a swarm intelligence algorithm based on natural heuristics, which has gained considerable attention from researchers and engineers. However, WOA still has some limitations, including limited global search efficiency and a slow convergence rate. To address these issues, this paper presents an improved whale optimization algorithm with multiple strategies, called Dynamic Gain-Sharing Whale Optimization Algorithm (DGSWOA). Specifically, a Sine–Tent–Cosine map is first adopted to more effectively initialize the population, ensuring a more uniform distribution of individuals across the search space. Then, a gaining–sharing knowledge based algorithm is used to enhance global search capability and avoid falling into a local optimum. Finally, to increase the diversity of solutions, Dynamic Opposition-Based Learning is incorporated for population updating. The effectiveness of our approach is evaluated through comparative experiments on blackbox optimization benchmarking and two engineering application problems. The experimental results suggest that the proposed method is competitive in terms of solution quality and convergence speed in most cases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Accurate parameter estimation is crucial and challenging for the design and modeling of PV cells/modules. However, the high degree of non-linearity of the typical I–V characteristic further complicates this task. Consequently, significant research interest has been generated in recent years. Currently, this trend has been marked by a noteworthy acceleration, mainly due to the rise of swarm intelligence and the rapid progress of computer technology. This paper proposes a developed Mountain Gazelle Optimizer (MGO) to generate the best values of the unknown parameters of PV generation units. The MGO mimics the social life and hierarchy of mountain gazelles in the wild. The MGO was compared with well-recognized recent algorithms, which were the Grey Wolf Optimizer (GWO), the Squirrel Search Algorithm (SSA), the Differential Evolution (DE) algorithm, the Bat–Artificial Bee Colony Optimizer (BABCO), the Bat Algorithm (BA), Multiswarm Spiral Leader Particle Swarm Optimization (M-SLPSO), the Guaranteed Convergence Particle Swarm Optimization algorithm (GCPSO), Triple-Phase Teaching–Learning-Based Optimization (TPTLBO), the Criss-Cross-based Nelder–Mead simplex Gradient-Based Optimizer (CCNMGBO), the quasi-Opposition-Based Learning Whale Optimization Algorithm (OBLWOA), and the Fractional Chaotic Ensemble Particle Swarm Optimizer (FC-EPSO). The experimental findings and statistical studies proved that the MGO outperformed the competing techniques in identifying the parameters of the Single-Diode Model (SDM) and the Double-Diode Model (DDM) PV models of Photowatt-PWP201 (polycrystalline) and STM6-40/36 (monocrystalline). The RMSEs of the MGO on the SDM and the DDM of Photowatt-PWP201 and STM6-40/36 were 2.042717 × 10 − 3 , 1.387641 × 10 − 3 , 1.719946 × 10 − 3 , and 1.686104 × 10 − 3 , respectively. Overall, the identified results highlighted that the MGO-based approach featured a fast processing time and steady convergence while retaining a high level of accuracy in the achieved solution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Metaheuristic optimization algorithms play a crucial role in optimization problems. However, the traditional identification methods have the following problems: (1) difficulties in nonlinear data processing; (2) high error rates caused by local stagnation; and (3) low classification rates resulting from premature convergence. This paper proposed a variant based on the gray wolf optimization algorithm (GWO) with chaotic disturbance, candidate migration, and attacking mechanisms, naming it the enhanced gray wolf optimizer (EGWO), to solve the problem of premature convergence and local stagnation. The performance of the EGWO was tested on IEEE CEC 2014 benchmark functions, and the results of the EGWO were compared with the performance of three GWO variants, five traditional and popular algorithms, and six recent algorithms. In addition, EGWO optimized the weights and biases of a multi-layer perceptron (MLP) and proposed an EGWO-MLP disease identification model; the model was tested on IEEE CEC 2014 benchmark functions, and EGWO-MLP was verified by UCI dataset including Tic-Tac-Toe, Heart, XOR, and Balloon datasets. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed EGWO-MLP model can effectively avoid local optimization problems and premature convergence and provide a quasi-optimal solution for the optimization problem. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recycling tasks are the most effective method for reducing waste generation, protecting the environment, and boosting the overall national economy. The productivity and effectiveness of the recycling process are strongly dependent on the cleanliness and precision of processed primary sources. However, recycling operations are often labor intensive, and computer vision and deep learning (DL) techniques aid in automatically detecting and classifying trash types during recycling chores. Due to the dimensional challenge posed by pre-trained CNN networks, the scientific community has developed numerous techniques inspired by biology, swarm intelligence theory, physics, and mathematical rules. This research applies a new meta-heuristic algorithm called the artificial hummingbird algorithm (AHA) to solving the waste classification problem based on feature selection. However, the performance of the AHA is barely satisfactory; it may be stuck in optimal local regions or have a slow convergence. To overcome these limitations, this paper develops two improved versions of the AHA called the AHA-ROBL and the AHA-OBL. These two versions enhance the exploitation stage by using random opposition-based learning (ROBL) and opposition-based learning (OBL) to prevent local optima and accelerate the convergence. The main purpose of this paper is to apply the AHA-ROBL and AHA-OBL to select the relevant deep features provided by two pre-trained models of CNN (VGG19 & ResNet20) to recognize a waste classification. The TrashNet dataset is used to verify the performance of the two proposed approaches (the AHA-ROBL and AHA-OBL). The effectiveness of the suggested methods (the AHA-ROBL and AHA-OBL) is compared with that of 12 modern and competitive optimizers, namely the artificial hummingbird algorithm (AHA), Harris hawks optimizer (HHO), Salp swarm algorithm (SSA), aquila optimizer (AO), Henry gas solubility optimizer (HGSO), particle swarm optimizer (PSO), grey wolf optimizer (GWO), Archimedes optimization algorithm (AOA), manta ray foraging optimizer (MRFO), sine cosine algorithm (SCA), marine predators algorithm (MPA), and rescue optimization algorithm (SAR). A fair evaluation of the proposed algorithms' performance is achieved using the same dataset. The performance analysis of the two proposed algorithms is applied in terms of different measures. The experimental results confirm the two proposed algorithms' superiority over other comparative algorithms. The AHA-ROBL and AHA-OBL produce the optimal number of selected features with the highest degree of precision. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Optimization is a broad field for researchers to develop new algorithms for solving various types of problems. There are various popular techniques being worked on for improvement. Grey wolf optimization (GWO) is one such algorithm because it is efficient, simple to use, and easy to implement. However, GWO has several drawbacks as it is stuck in local optima, has a low convergence rate, and has poor exploration. Several attempts have been made recently to overcome these drawbacks. This paper discusses some strategies that can be applied to GWO to overcome its drawbacks. This article proposes a novel algorithm to enhance the convergence rate, which was poor in GWO, and it is also compared with the other optimization algorithms. GWO also has the limitation of becoming stuck in local optima when used in complex functions or in a large search space, so these issues are further addressed. The most remarkable factor is that GWO purely depends on the initialization constraints such as population size and wolf initial positions. This study demonstrates the improved position of the wolf by applying strategies with the same population size. As a result, this novel algorithm has enhanced its exploration capability compared to other algorithms presented, and statistical results are also presented to demonstrate its superiority. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Competitive Swarm Optimizer (CSO) has emerged as a prominent technique for solving intricate optimization problems by updating only half of the population in each iteration. Despite its effectiveness, the CSO algorithm often exhibits a slow convergence rate and a tendency to become trapped in local optimal solutions, as is common among metaheuristic algorithms. To address these challenges, this paper proposes a hybrid approach combining the CSO with the Salp Swarm algorithm (SSA), CL-SSA, to increase the convergence rate and enhance search space exploration. The proposed approach involves a two-step process. In the first step, a pairwise competition mechanism is introduced to segregate the solutions into winners and losers. The winning population is updated through strong exploitation using the SSA algorithm. In the second step, non-winning solutions learn from the winners, achieving a balance between exploration and exploitation. The performance of the CL-SSA is evaluated on various benchmark functions, including the CEC2017 benchmark with dimensions 50 and 100, the CEC2008lsgo benchmark with dimensions 200, 500 and 1000, as well as a set of seven well-known constrained design challenges in various engineering domains defined in the CEC2020 conference. The CL-SSA is compared to other metaheuristics and advanced algorithms, and its results are analyzed through statistical tests such as the Friedman and Wilcoxon rank-sum tests. The statistical analysis demonstrates that the CL-SSA algorithm exhibits improved exploitation, exploration, and convergence patterns compared to other algorithms, including SSA and CSO, as well as popular algorithms. Furthermore, the proposed hybrid approach performs better in solving most test functions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reporting the empirical results of swarm and evolutionary computation algorithms is a challenging task with many possible difficulties. These difficulties stem from the stochastic nature of such algorithms, as well as their inability to guarantee an optimal solution in polynomial time. This research deals with measuring the performance of stochastic optimization algorithms, as well as the confidence intervals of the empirically obtained statistics. Traditionally, the arithmetic mean is used for measuring average performance, but we propose quantiles for measuring average, peak and bad-case performance, and give their interpretations in a relevant context for measuring the performance of the metaheuristics. In order to investigate the differences between arithmetic mean and quantiles, and to confirm possible benefits, we conducted experiments with 7 stochastic algorithms and 20 unconstrained continuous variable optimization problems. The experiments showed that median was a better measure of average performance than arithmetic mean, based on the observed solution quality. Out of 20 problem instances, a discrepancy between the arithmetic mean and median happened in 6 instances, out of which 5 were resolved in favor of median and 1 instance remained unresolved as a near tie. The arithmetic mean was completely inadequate for measuring average performance based on the observed number of function evaluations, while the 0.5 quantile (median) was suitable for that task. The quantiles also showed to be adequate for assessing peak performance and bad-case performance. In this paper, we also proposed a bootstrap method to calculate the confidence intervals of the probability of the empirically obtained quantiles. Considering the many advantages of using quantiles, including the ability to calculate probabilities of success in the case of multiple executions of the algorithm and the practically useful method of calculating confidence intervals, we recommend quantiles as the standard measure of peak, average and bad-case performance of stochastic optimization algorithms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Formation control is one of the most concerning topics within the realm of swarm intelligence. This paper presents a metaheuristic approach that leverages a natural co-evolutionary strategy to solve the formation control problem for a swarm of missiles. The missile swarm is modeled by a second-order system with a heterogeneous reference target, and the exponential of the resultant error is accumulated to be the objective function such that the swarm converges to optimal equilibrium states satisfying specific formation requirements. Focusing on the issue of the local optimum and unstable evolution, we incorporate a novel model-based policy constraint and a population adaptation strategy that significantly alleviates the performance degradation of the existing natural co-evolutionary strategy in terms of slow training and instability of convergence. With application of the Molloy–Reed criterion in the field of network communication, we developed an adaptive topology method that assures connectivity under node failure, and its effectiveness is validated theoretically and experimentally. The experimental results demonstrate that the accuracy of formation flight achieved by this method is competitive with that of conventional control methods and is much more adaptable. More significantly, we show that it is feasible to treat the generic formation control problem as an optimal control problem for finding a Nash equilibrium strategy and solving it through iterative learning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mobile robots are relevant dynamic systems in recent applications. Path planning is an essential task for these robots since it allows them to move from one location to another safely and at an affordable cost. Path planning has been studied extensively for static scenarios. However, when the scenarios are dynamic, research is limited due to the complexity and high cost of continuously re-planning the robot's movements to ensure its safety. This paper proposes a new, simple, reliable, and affordable method to plan safe and optimized paths for differential mobile robots in dynamic scenarios. The method is based on the online re-optimization of the static parameters in the state-of-the-art deterministic path planner Bug0. Due to the complexity of the dynamic path planning problem, a metaheuristic optimization approach is adopted. This approach utilizes metaheuristics from evolutionary computation and swarm intelligence to find the Bug0 parameters when the mobile robot is approaching an obstacle. The proposal is tested in simulation, and well-known metaheuristic methods are compared, including Differential Evolution (DE), the Genetic Algorithm (GA), and Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO). The dynamic planner based on PSO generates paths with the best performances. In addition, the results of the PSO-based planner are compared with different Bug0 configurations, and the former is shown to be significantly better. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Optimization problems are prevalent in almost all areas and hence optimization algorithms are crucial for a myriad of real-world applications. Deterministic optimization algorithms tend to be computationally costly and time-consuming. Hence, heuristic and metaheuristic algorithms are more favoured as they provide near-optimal solutions in an acceptable amount of time. Swarm intelligence algorithms are being increasingly used for optimization problems owing to their simplicity and good performance. The Dragonfly Algorithm (DA) is one which is inspired by the swarming behaviours of dragonflies, and it has been proven to have a superior performance than other algorithms in multiple applications. Hence, it is worth considering its application to the traveling salesman problem which is a predominant discrete optimization problem. The original DA is only suitable for solving continuous optimization problems and, although there is a binary version of the algorithm, it is not easily adapted for solving discrete optimization problems like TSP. We have previously proposed a discrete adapted DA algorithm suitable for TSP. However, it has low effectiveness, and it has not been used for large TSP problems. In this paper, we propose an optimized discrete adapted DA by using the steepest ascent hill climbing algorithm as a local search. The algorithm is applied to a TSP problem modelling a package delivery system in the Kuala Lumpur area and to benchmark TSP problems, and it is found to have a higher effectiveness than the discrete adapted DA and some other swarm intelligence algorithms. It also has a higher efficiency than the discrete adapted DA. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many metaheuristic approaches have been developed to select effective features from different medical datasets in a feasible time. However, most of them cannot scale well to large medical datasets, where they fail to maximize the classification accuracy and simultaneously minimize the number of selected features. Therefore, this paper is devoted to developing an efficient binary version of the quantum-based avian navigation optimizer algorithm (QANA) named BQANA, utilizing the scalability of the QANA to effectively select the optimal feature subset from high-dimensional medical datasets using two different approaches. In the first approach, several binary versions of the QANA are developed using S-shaped, V-shaped, U-shaped, Z-shaped, and quadratic transfer functions to map the continuous solutions of the canonical QANA to binary ones. In the second approach, the QANA is mapped to binary space by converting each variable to 0 or 1 using a threshold. To evaluate the proposed algorithm, first, all binary versions of the QANA are assessed on different medical datasets with varied feature sizes, including Pima, HeartEW, Lymphography, SPECT Heart, PenglungEW, Parkinson, Colon, SRBCT, Leukemia, and Prostate tumor. The results show that the BQANA developed by the second approach is superior to other binary versions of the QANA to find the optimal feature subset from the medical datasets. Then, the BQANA was compared with nine well-known binary metaheuristic algorithms, and the results were statistically assessed using the Friedman test. The experimental and statistical results demonstrate that the proposed BQANA has merit for feature selection from medical datasets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent advances in online payment technologies combined with the impact of the COVID-19 global pandemic has led to a significant escalation in the number of online transactions and credit card payments being executed every day. Naturally, there has also been an escalation in credit card frauds, which is having a significant impact on the banking institutions, corporations that issue credit cards, and finally, the vendors and merchants. Consequently, there is an urgent need to implement and establish proper mechanisms that can secure the integrity of online card transactions. The research presented in this paper proposes a hybrid machine learning and swarm metaheuristic approach to address the challenge of credit card fraud detection. The novel, enhanced firefly algorithm, named group search firefly algorithm, was devised and then used to a tune support vector machine, an extreme learning machine, and extreme gradient-boosting machine learning models. Boosted models were tested on the real-world credit card fraud detection dataset, gathered from the transactions of the European credit card users. The original dataset is highly imbalanced; to further analyze the performance of tuned machine learning models, in the second experiment performed for the purpose of this research, the dataset has been expanded by utilizing the synthetic minority over-sampling approach. The performance of the proposed group search firefly metaheuristic was compared with other recent state-of-the-art approaches. Standard machine learning performance indicators have been used for the evaluation, such as the accuracy of the classifier, recall, precision, and area under the curve. The experimental findings clearly demonstrate that the models tuned by the proposed algorithm obtained superior results in comparison to other models hybridized with competitor metaheuristics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Swarm intelligence-based metaheuristic algorithms have attracted the attention of the research community and have been exploited for effectively solving different optimization problems of engineering, science, and technology. This paper considers the parameter estimation of the control autoregressive (CAR) model by applying a novel swarm intelligence-based optimization algorithm called the Aquila optimizer (AO). The parameter tuning of AO is performed statistically on different generations and population sizes. The performance of the AO is investigated statistically in various noise levels for the parameters with the best tuning. The robustness and reliability of the AO are carefully examined under various scenarios for CAR identification. The experimental results indicate that the AO is accurate, convergent, and robust for parameter estimation of CAR systems. The comparison of the AO heuristics with recent state of the art counterparts through nonparametric statistical tests established the efficacy of the proposed scheme for CAR estimation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Salp Swarm Algorithm (SSA) is a bio-inspired metaheuristic optimization technique that mimics the collective behavior of Salp chains hunting for food in the ocean. While it demonstrates competitive performance on benchmark problems, the SSA faces challenges with slow convergence and getting trapped in local optima like many population-based algorithms. To address these limitations, this study proposes the locally weighted Salp Swarm Algorithm (LWSSA), which combines two mechanisms into the standard SSA framework. First, a locally weighted approach is introduced and integrated into the SSA to guide the search toward locally promising regions. This heuristic iteratively probes high-quality solutions in the neighborhood and refines the current position. Second, a mutation operator generates new positions for Salp followers to increase randomness throughout the search. In order to assess its effectiveness, the proposed approach was evaluated against the state-of-the-art metaheuristics using standard test functions from the IEEE CEC 2021 and IEEE CEC 2017 competitions. The methodology is also applied to a risk assessment of cardiovascular disease (CVD). Seven optimization strategies of the extreme gradient boosting (XGBoost) classifier are evaluated and compared to the proposed LWSSA-XGBoost model. The proposed LWSSA-XGBoost achieves superior prediction performance with 94% F1 score, 94% recall, 93% accuracy, and 93% area under the ROC curve in comparison with state-of-the-art competitors. Overall, the experimental results demonstrate that the LWSSA enhances SSA's optimization ability and XGBoost predictive power in automated CVD risk assessment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Optimizing large-scale numerical problems is a significant challenge with numerous real-world applications. The optimization process is complex due to the multi-dimensional search spaces and possesses several locally optimal regions. In response to this issue, various metaheuristic algorithms and variations have been developed, including evolutionary and swarm intelligence algorithms and hybrids of different artificial intelligence techniques. Previous studies have shown that swarm intelligence algorithms like PSO perform poorly in high-dimensional spaces, even with algorithms focused on reducing the search space. However, we propose a modified version of the PSO algorithm called Dynamical Sphere Regrouping PSO (DSRegPSO) to avoid stagnation in local optimal regions. DSRegPSO is based on the PSO algorithm and modifies inertial behavior with a regrouping dynamical sphere mechanism and a momentum conservation physics effect. These behaviors maintain the swarm's diversity and regulate the exploration and exploitation of the search space while avoiding stagnation in optimal local regions. The DSRegPSO mechanisms mimic the behavior of birds, moving particles similar to birds when they look for a new food source. Additionally, the momentum conservation effect mimics how birds react to collisions with the boundaries in their search space or when they are looking for food. We evaluated DSRegPSO by testing 15 optimizing functions with up to 1000 dimensions of the CEC'13 benchmark, a standard for evaluating Large-Scale Global Optimization used in Congress on Evolutionary Computation, and several journals. Our proposal improves the behavior of all variants of PSO registered in the toolkit of comparison for CEC'13 and obtains the best result in the non-separable functions against all the algorithms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The seagull optimization algorithm (SOA) is a novel swarm intelligence algorithm proposed in recent years. The algorithm has some defects in the search process. To overcome the problem of poor convergence accuracy and easy to fall into local optimality of seagull optimization algorithm, this paper proposed a new variant SOA based on individual disturbance (ID) and attraction-repulsion (AR) strategy, called IDARSOA, which employed ID to enhance the ability to jump out of local optimum and adopted AR to increase the diversity of population and make the exploration of solution space more efficient. The effectiveness of the IDARSOA has been verified using representative comprehensive benchmark functions and six practical engineering optimization problems. The experimental results show that the proposed IDARSOA has the advantages of better convergence accuracy and a strong optimization ability than the original SOA. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper introduces a novel population-based bio-inspired meta-heuristic optimization algorithm, called Blood Coagulation Algorithm (BCA). BCA derives inspiration from the process of blood coagulation in the human body. The underlying concepts and ideas behind the proposed algorithm are the cooperative behavior of thrombocytes and their intelligent strategy of clot formation. These behaviors are modeled and utilized to underscore intensification and diversification in a given search space. A comparison with various state-of-the-art meta-heuristic algorithms over a test suite of 23 renowned benchmark functions reflects the efficiency of BCA. An extensive investigation is conducted to analyze the performance, convergence behavior and computational complexity of BCA. The comparative study and statistical test analysis demonstrate that BCA offers very competitive and statistically significant results compared to other eminent meta-heuristic algorithms. Experimental results also show the consistent performance of BCA in high dimensional search spaces. Furthermore, we demonstrate the applicability of BCA on real-world applications by solving several real-life engineering problems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Swarm intelligence has appeared as an active field for solving numerous machine-learning tasks. In this paper, we address the problem of clustering data with missing values, where the patterns are described by mixed (or hybrid) features. We introduce a generic modification to three swarm intelligence algorithms (Artificial Bee Colony, Firefly Algorithm, and Novel Bat Algorithm). We experimentally obtain the adequate values of the parameters for these three modified algorithms, with the purpose of applying them in the clustering task. We also provide an unbiased comparison among several metaheuristics based clustering algorithms, concluding that the clusters obtained by our proposals are highly representative of the "natural structure" of data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nature-inspired metaheuristic algorithms have gained great attention over the last decade due to their potential for finding optimal solutions to different optimization problems. In this study, a metaheuristic based on the dwarf mongoose optimization algorithm (DMOA) is presented for the parameter estimation of an autoregressive exogenous (ARX) model. In the DMOA, the set of candidate solutions were stochastically created and improved using only one tuning parameter. The performance of the DMOA for ARX identification was deeply investigated in terms of its convergence speed, estimation accuracy, robustness and reliability. Furthermore, comparative analyses with other recent state-of-the-art metaheuristics based on Aquila Optimizer, the Sine Cosine Algorithm, the Arithmetic Optimization Algorithm and the Reptile Search algorithm—using a nonparametric Kruskal–Wallis test—endorsed the consistent, accurate performance of the proposed metaheuristic for ARX identification. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Inspired by the behavior of elephants in nature, elephant herd optimization (EHO) was proposed recently for global optimization. Like most other metaheuristic algorithms, EHO does not use the previous individuals in the later updating process. If the useful information in the previous individuals were fully exploited and used in the later optimization process, the quality of solutions may be improved significantly. In this paper, we propose several new updating strategies for EHO, in which one, two, or three individuals are selected from the previous iterations, and their useful information is incorporated into the updating process. Accordingly, the final individual at this iteration is generated according to the elephant generated by the basic EHO, and the selected previous elephants through a weighted sum. The weights are determined by a random number and the fitness of the elephant individuals at the previous iteration. We incorporated each of the six individual updating strategies individually into the basic EHO, creating six improved variants of EHO. We benchmarked these proposed methods using sixteen test functions. Our experimental results demonstrated that the proposed improved methods significantly outperformed the basic EHO. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The fast-growing Internet results in massive amounts of text data. Due to the large volume of the unstructured format of text data, extracting relevant information and its analysis becomes very challenging. Text document clustering is a text-mining process that partitions the set of text-based documents into mutually exclusive clusters in such a way that documents within the same group are similar to each other, while documents from different clusters differ based on the content. One of the biggest challenges in text clustering is partitioning the collection of text data by measuring the relevance of the content in the documents. Addressing this issue, in this work a hybrid swarm intelligence algorithm with a K-means algorithm is proposed for text clustering. First, the hybrid fruit-fly optimization algorithm is tested on ten unconstrained CEC2019 benchmark functions. Next, the proposed method is evaluated on six standard benchmark text datasets. The experimental evaluation on the unconstrained functions, as well as on text-based documents, indicated that the proposed approach is robust and superior to other state-of-the-art methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We present Stochastic Optimisation Software (SOS), a Java platform facilitating the algorithmic design process and the evaluation of metaheuristic optimisation algorithms. SOS reduces the burden of coding miscellaneous methods for dealing with several bothersome and time-demanding tasks such as parameter tuning, implementation of comparison algorithms and testbed problems, collecting and processing data to display results, measuring algorithmic overhead, etc. SOS provides numerous off-the-shelf methods including: (1) customised implementations of statistical tests, such as the Wilcoxon rank-sum test and the Holm–Bonferroni procedure, for comparing the performances of optimisation algorithms and automatically generating result tables in PDF and LATEX formats; (2) the implementation of an original advanced statistical routine for accurately comparing couples of stochastic optimisation algorithms; (3) the implementation of a novel testbed suite for continuous optimisation, derived from the IEEE CEC 2014 benchmark, allowing for controlled activation of the rotation on each testbed function. Moreover, we briefly comment on the current state of the literature in stochastic optimisation and highlight similarities shared by modern metaheuristics inspired by nature. We argue that the vast majority of these algorithms are simply a reformulation of the same methods and that metaheuristics for optimisation should be simply treated as stochastic processes with less emphasis on the inspiring metaphor behind them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]