Particle Swarm Optimization in the EDAs framework

Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) is a popular optimization technique based on swarm intelligence concepts. Estimation of Distribution Algorithms (EDAs) are a relatively new class of evolutionary algorithms which build a probabilistic model of the population dynamics and use this model to sample new individuals. Recently, the hybridization of PSO and EDAs is emerged as a new research trend. In this paper, we introduce a new hybrid approach that uses a mixture of Gaussian distributions. The obtained algorithm, called PSEDA, can be seen as an implementation of the PSO behaviour in the EDAs framework. Experiments on well known benchmark functions have been held and the performances of PSEDA are compared with those of classical PSO.