Information Literacy Assessment with a Modified Hybrid Differential Evolution with Model-Based Reinitialization

Information literacy assessment is extremely important for the evaluation of the information literacy skills of college students. Intelligent optimization technique is an effective strategy to optimize the weight parameters of the information literacy assessment index system (ILAIS). In this paper, a new version of differential evolution algorithm (DE), named hybrid differential evolution with model-based reinitialization (HDEMR), is proposed to accurately fit the weight parameters of ILAIS. The main contributions of this paper are as follows: firstly, an improved contraction criterion which is based on the population entropy in objective space and the maximum distance in decision space is employed to decide when the local search starts. Secondly, a modified model-based population reinitialization strategy is designed to enhance the global search ability of HDEMR to handle complex problems. Two types of experiments are designed to assess the performance of HDEMR. In the first type of experiments, HDEMR is tested and compared with seven well-known DE variants on CEC2005 and CEC2014 benchmark functions. In the second type of experiments, HDEMR is compared with the well-known and widely used deterministic algorithm DIRECT on GKLS test classes. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of HDEMR for global numerical optimization and show better performance. Furthermore, HDEMR is applied to optimize the weight parameters of ILAIS at China University of Geosciences (CUG), and satisfactory results are obtained.