Our objective in this paper is to compare the performance of the Differential Evolution (DE) and the Repulsive Particle Swarm (RPS) methods of global optimization. To this end, some relatively difficult test functions have been chosen. These functions are: Perm, Power-Sum, Bukin, Zero-Sum,...

In this paper we compare the performance of the Differential Evolution (DE) and the Repulsive Particle Swarm (RPS) methods of global optimization. To this end, seventy test functions have been chosen. Among these test functions, some are new while others are well known in the literature; some are...

On many occasions we need to construct an index that represents a number of variables. Cost of living index, general price index, human development index, index of level of development, etc are some of the examples that are constructed by a weighted (linear) aggregation of a host of variables....

This paper demonstrates that if we intend to optimally rank order n objects (candidates) each of which has m attributes or rank scores awarded by m evaluators, then the ordinal ranking of objects by the conventional principal component based factor scores turns out to be suboptimal. Three...

This paper aims at comparing the performance of the Differential Evolution (DE) and the Repulsive Particle Swarm (RPS) methods of global optimization. To this end, some relatively difficult test functions have been chosen. Among these test functions, some are new while others are well known in...

Correlation matrices have many applications, particularly in marketing and financial economics. The need to forecast demand for a group of products in order to realize savings by properly managing inventories requires the use of correlation matrices. In many cases, due to paucity of...

This article describes the R package DEoptim which implements the differential evolution algorithm for the global optimization of a real-valued function of a real-valued parameter vector. The implementation of differential evolution in DEoptim interfaces with C code for efficiency. The utility...

The objective of this paper is to introduce a new population-based (stochastic) heuristic to search the global optimum of a (continuous) multi-modal function and to assess its performance (on a fairly large number of benchmark functions) vis-à-vis that of two other well-established and very...

In 1991 India chose to open her economy and formulated the New Economic Policy (NEP). Under the structural adjustment and reform programmes, the NEP aimed at promoting growth by eliminating supply bottlenecks that hinder competitiveness, efficiency and dynamism in the economic system This study...

Signal waveforms are very fast dampening oscillatory time series composed of exponential functions. The regular least squares fitting techniques are often unstable when used to fit exponential functions to such signal waveforms since such functions are highly correlated. Of late, some attempts...