On the usage of differential evolution for function optimization

Abstract

Differential evolution (DE) has recently proven to be an efficient method for optimizing real-valued multi-modal objective functions. Besides its good convergence properties and suitability for parallelization, DE's main assets are its conceptual simplicity and ease of use. This paper describes several variants of DE and elaborates on the choice of DE's control parameters, which corresponds to the application of fuzzy rules. Finally, the design of a howling removal unit with DE is described to provide a real-world example for DE's applicability.