Competitive Learning: A New Meta-Heuristic Optimization Algorithm

This work proposes a new powerful meta-heuristic optimization algorithm in education process called Competitive Learning (CLA). The algorithm is benchmarked on 8 well-known test functions, and the results are verified by a comparative study with some meta-heuristic optimization methods including: Imperialist Competitive Algorithm (ICA), Teaching-Learning-Based Optimization (TLBO), Grey Wolf Algorithm (GWO), Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) and Genetic Algorithm (GA). Analyzing the findings, it is shown that the CLA algorithm is able to provide more accurate results than other well-known meta-heuristic ones. Also, those results applied to famous unimodal and multimodal benchmarks show CLA is efficient in improving accuracy as well as computational speed.