An analysis of cooperative coevolutionary differential evolution as neural networks optimizer

Differential Evolution for Neural Networks (DENN) is an optimizer for neural network weights based on Differential Evolution. Although DENN has shown good performance with middle-size networks, the number of weights is an evident limitation of the approach. The aim of this work is to figure out if coevolutionary strategies implemented on top of DENN could be of help during the optimization phase. Moreover, we studied two of the classical problems connected to the application of evolutionary computation, i.e. the stagnation and the lack of population diversity, and the use of a crowding strategy to address them. The system has been tested on classical benchmark classification problems and experimental results are presented and discussed.