Performance evaluation of black hole algorithm, gravitational search algorithm and particle swarm optimization

Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) and Gravitational Search Algorithm are a well known population-based heuristic optimization techniques. PSO is inspired from a motion flock of birds searching for a food. In PSO, a bird adjusts its position according to its own ‘‘experience’’ as well as the experience of other birds. Tracking and memorizing the best position encountered build bird’s experience which will leads to optimal solution. GSA is based on the Newtonian gravity and motion laws between several masses. In GSA, the heaviest mass presents an optimum solution in the search space. Other agents inside the population are attracted to heaviest mass and will finally converge to produce best solution. Black Hole Algorithm (BH) is one of the optimization technique recently proposed for data clustering problem. BH algorithm is inspired by the natural universe phenomenon called "black hole”. In BH algorithm, the best solution is selected to be the black hole and the rest of candidates which are called stars will be drawn towards the black hole. In this paper, performance of BH algorithm will be analyzed and reviewed for continuous search space using CEC2014 benchmark dataset against Gravitational Search Algorithm (GSA) and Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO). CEC2014 benchmark dataset contains 4 unimodal, 7 multimodal and 6 hybrid functions. Several common parameters has been chosen to make an equal comparison between these algorithm such as size of population is 30, 1000 iteration, 30 dimension and 30 times of experiment.