A multi-agent system based for solving high-dimensional optimization problems: A case study on email spam detection

There exist numerous high-dimensional problems in the real world which cannot be solved through the common traditional methods. The metaheuristic algorithms have been developed as successful techniques for solving a variety of complex and difficult optimization problems. Notwithstanding their advantages, these algorithms may turn out to have weak points such as lower population diversity and lower convergence rate when facing complex high-dimensional problems. An appropriate approach to solve such problems is to apply multi-agent systems (MASs) along with the metaheuristic algorithms. The present paper proposes a new approach based on the MASs and the concept of agent, which is named MAS as Metaheuristic (MAMH) method. In the proposed method, several basic and powerful metaheuristic algorithms are considered as separate agents, each of which sought to achieve its own goals while competing and cooperating with others to achieve the common goals. Altogether, the proposed method was tested on 32 complex benchmark functions, the results of which indicated the effectiveness and powerfulness of the proposed method for solving high-dimensional optimization problems. In addition, in this paper, the binary version of the proposed method, called Binary MAMH (BMAMH), was implemented on the email spam detection. According to the results, the proposed method exhibited a higher degree of precision in the detection of spam emails compared to other metaheuristic algorithms and methods.