An Improved Particle Swarm Optimization Algorithm for Data Classification

Abstract

Optimisation-based methods are enormously used in the field of data classification. Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) is a metaheuristic algorithm based on swarm intelligence, widely used to solve global optimisation problems throughout the real world. The main problem PSO faces is premature convergence due to lack of diversity, and it is usually stuck in local minima when dealing with complex real-world problems. In meta-heuristic algorithms, population initialisation is an important factor affecting population diversity and convergence speed. In this study, we propose an improved PSO algorithm variant that enhances convergence speed and population diversity by applying pseudo-random sequences and opposite rank inertia weights instead of using random distributions for initialisation. This paper also presents a novel initialisation population method using a quasi-random sequence (Faure) to create the initialisation of the swarm, and through the opposition-based method, an opposite swarm is generated. We proposed an opposition rank-based inertia weight approach to adjust the inertia weights of particles to increase the performance of the standard PSO. The proposed algorithm (ORIW-PSO-F) has been tested to optimise the weight of the feed-forward neural network for fifteen data sets taken from UCI. The proposed techniques’ experiment result depicts much better performance than other existing techniques.

Keywords

• feed-forward neural network
• quasi-random sequence
• opposition rank-based inertia weight
• particle swarm optimisation