CenDE: Centroid-Based Differential Evolution

Differential Evolution (DE) is a popular global optimization algorithm, mostly due to its high performance, easy implementation, and utilization of a few control parameters. The mutation scheme is one of the important steps of DE, which selects a number of individuals from the population as parents to generate the next population during its evolutionary process. The parents are traditionally selected randomly and in some mutation schemes the best member of population is selected as one of the parents. In this paper, we propose the centroid-based differential evolution (CenDE) algorithm, which uses the centroid of top three individuals in the population in terms of objective function value performance as the base parent. The experiments are conducted for high and low dimensional problems with small and standard population sizes on CEC Black-Box Optimization Benchmark problems 2015 (CEC-BBOB 2015). Our experiments show that the center of best three individuals plays an important role in generating candidate individuals with better objective values for the next generation, resulting in a faster convergence of the DE algorithm.