Multi-Strategy-Improved Growth Optimizer and Its Applications

The growth optimizer (GO) is a novel metaheuristic algorithm designed to tackle complex optimization problems. Despite its advantages of simplicity and high efficiency, GO often encounters localized stagnation when dealing with discretized, high-dimensional, and multi-constraint problems. To address these issues, this paper proposes an enhanced version of GO called CODGBGO. This algorithm incorporates three strategies to enhance its performance. Firstly, the Circle-OBL initialization strategy is employed to enhance the quality of the initial population. Secondly, an exploration strategy is implemented to improve population diversity and the algorithm’s ability to escape local optimum traps. Finally, the exploitation strategy is utilized to enhance the convergence speed and accuracy of the algorithm. To validate the performance of CODGBGO, it is applied to solve the CEC2017, CEC2020, 18 feature selection problems, and 4 real engineering optimization problems. The experiments demonstrate that the novel CODGBGO algorithm effectively addresses the challenges posed by complex optimization problems, offering a promising approach.