Harmony-driven technique for solving optimization and engineering problems

Optimization techniques play a crucial role in improving the performance of machine learning applications. However, traditional techniques may not be suitable for addressing complex problems that involve numerous parameters requiring adaptation. This paper presents a novel variant of the gradient-based optimizer (GBO) and investigates the effectiveness of integrating the harmony search (HS) algorithm to enhance the GBO algorithm. The HS algorithm offers several advantages, including fast convergence and fewer adjustable parameters. The proposed method, called GBOHS, is evaluated through three experiments. The first experiment focuses on solving global optimization problems, while the second experiment assesses its ability to select the most relevant features using sixteen benchmark feature selection datasets. The final experiment applies the GBOHS method to solve five real engineering problems. The results are compared against those of well-known optimization algorithms using various performance measures, including fitness function value and classification accuracy. The findings demonstrate that the proposed GBOHS method achieves high accuracy and consistently outperforms the compared methods across all the experiments, demonstrating its promising effectiveness.