Abstract:

Differential Evolution (DE) is a heuristic stochastic search algorithm based on population differences, which has advantages of simple parameters and fast convergence rate. However, it has weak robustness, especially for multimodal problems. Therefore, this paper proposes a Cooperative Differential Evolution with Dynamical population (DynCDE). In the proposed algorithm, the K-means method is employed to partition the whole population. For the high convergence rate of DE/current-to-best/ 1/bin, the neighbor-based mutation strategy is applied and the dynamic population size method based on aging mechanism and lifecycle mechanism is designed to keep the balance between exploration and exploitation. This modified DE has the potential to improve prediction accuracy of neural networks. Finally, this DynCDE-based neural network model is applied to solving the short-term traffic flow prediction problem, which offers very excellent results.