A learning-based hybrid framework for dynamic balancing of exploration-exploitation: Combining regression analysis and metaheuristics

The idea of hybrid approaches have become a powerful strategy for tackling several complex optimisation problems. In this regard, the present work is concerned with contributing with a novel optimisation framework, named learning-based linear balancer (LB2). A regression model is designed, with the objective to predict better movements for the approach and improve the performance. The main idea is to balance the intensification and diversification performed by the hybrid model in an online-fashion. In this paper, we employ movement operators of a spotted hyena optimiser, a modern algorithm which has proved to yield good results in the literature. In order to test the performance of our hybrid approach, we solve 15 benchmark functions, composed of unimodal, multimodal, and mutimodal functions with fixed dimension. Additionally, regarding the competitiveness, we carry out a comparison against state-of-the-art algorithms, and the sequential parameter optimisation procedure, which is part of multiple successful tuning methods proposed in the literature. Finally, we compare against the traditional implementation of a spotted hyena optimiser and a neural network approach, the respective statistical analysis is carried out. We illustrate experimental results, where we obtain interesting performance and robustness, which allows us to conclude that our hybrid approach is a competitive alternative in the optimisation field.