A study on base vector for differential evolution

Abstract

One of the keys leading to the success of differential evolution is its mechanism of differential mutation for generating mutant vectors. In the community of differential evolution, the mutation operator is usually marked as x/y where x indicates how the base vector is chosen and y (≥1) is the number of vector differences added to the base vector. It is noted that rand/1 has been the most widely used mutation operator. However, a comprehensive comparative parametric study on differential evolution shows that strategies applying random base vector are neither efficient nor robust. © 2008 IEEE.