An Enhanced Competitive Swarm Optimizer with Strongly Convex Sparse Operator for Large-Scale Multi-Objective Optimization

Sparse multi-objective optimization problems have become increasingly important in many applications in recent years, e.g., the search for lightweight deep neural networks and high-dimensional feature selection. However, little attention has been paid to sparse large-scale multi-objective optimization problems, whose Pareto optimal sets are sparse, i.e., with many decision variables equal to zero. To address this issue, this paper proposes an enhanced competitive swarm optimization algorithm assisted by a strongly convex sparse operator. A tri-competition mechanism is introduced into competitive swarm optimization, aiming to strike a better balance between exploration and exploitation. In addition, the strongly convex sparse operator is embedded in the position updating of the particles to generate sparse solutions. Our simulation results show that the proposed algorithm outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on both sparse test problems and application examples.