A multi-strategy improved snake optimizer and its application to SVM parameter selection

Support vector machine (SVM) is an effective classification tool and maturely used in various fields. However, its performance is very sensitive to parameters. As a newly proposed swarm intelligence algorithm, snake optimizer algorithm (SO) can help to solve the parameter selection problem. Nevertheless, SO has the shortcomings of weak population initialization, slow convergence speed in the early stage, and being easy to fall into local optimization. To address these problems, an improved snake optimizer algorithm (ISO) was proposed. The mirror opposition-based learning mechanism (MOBL) improved the population quality to enhance the optimization speed. The novel evolutionary population dynamics model (NEPD) was beneficial for searching accurately. The differential evolution strategy (DES) helped to reduce the probability of falling into local optimal value. The experimental results of classical benchmark functions and CEC2022 showed that ISO had higher optimization precision and faster convergence rate. In addition, it was also applied to the parameter selection of SVM to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed ISO.