Accelerating evolutionary computation using a convergence point estimated by weighted moving vectors

We introduce weighted moving vectors to increase the accuracy of estimating a convergence point of population and evaluate its efficiency. Key point is to weight moving vectors according to their reliability when a convergence point is calculated instead of equal weighting of the original method. We propose two different methods to evaluate the reliability of moving vectors. The first approach uses the fitness gradient information between starting points and terminal points of moving vectors for their weights. When a fitness gradient is bigger, the direction of a moving vector may have more potential, and a higher weight is given to it. The second one uses the fitness of parents, i.e., starting points of moving vectors, to give weights for moving vectors. Because an individual with higher fitness may have a high probability of being close to the optimal area, it should be given a higher weight, vice versa. If the estimated point is better than the worst individual in current population, it is used as an elite individual and replace the worst one to accelerate the convergence of evolutionary algorithms. To evaluate the performance of our proposal, we employ differential evolution and particle swarm optimization as baseline algorithms in our evaluation experiments and run them on 28 benchmark functions from CEC 2013. The experimental results confirmed that introducing weights can further improve the accuracy of an estimated convergence point, which helps to make EC search faster. Finally, some open topics are given to discuss.