A guided Hopfield evolutionary algorithm with local search for maximum clique problem

In this paper, a novel hybrid evolutionary algorithm combining a Hopfield net and a local search strategy is proposed to solve maximum clique problem. The algorithm makes full use of powerful searching capability of Hopfield net and probabilistic statistic feature of estimation of distribution algorithm to produce wider search in global solution domain. In particular, a possible extension way correlated with local search optimization is introduced to affect the mutation probability thus to produce guided evolution. Experiments on the popular DIMACS benchmark demonstrate that the hybrid evolutionary algorithm produces comparable and better results than other compared algorithms, including EA/G which is a state-of-the-art algorithm in the field of evolutionary computation.