Multiple strategies grey wolf optimizer for constrained portfolio optimization

Grey Wolf Optimizer (GWO) is competitive to other population-based algorithms. However, considering that the conventional GWO has inadequate global search capacity, a GWO variant based on multiple strategies, i.e., adaptive Evolutionary Population Dynamics (EPD) strategy, differential perturbation strategy, and greedy selection strategy, named as ADGGWO, is proposed in this paper. Firstly, the adaptive EPD strategy is adopted to enhance the search capacity by updating the position of the worst wolves according to the best ones. Secondly, the exploration capacity is extended by the use of differential perturbation strategy. Thirdly, the greedy selection improves the exploitation capacity, contributing to the balance between exploration and exploitation capacity. ADGGWO has been examined on a suite from CEC2014 and compared with the traditional GWO as well as its three latest variants. The significance of the results is evaluated by two non-parametric tests, Friedman test and Wilcoxon test. Furthermore, constrained portfolio optimization is applied in this paper to investigate the performance of ADGGWO on real-world problems. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm, which integrates multiple strategies, outperforms the traditional GWO and other GWO variants in terms of both accuracy and convergence. It can be proved that ADGGWO is not only effective for function optimization but also for practical problems.