Understanding particle swarm optimization

PSO is also a population-based heuristic search method, similar to the GA method. PSO is inspired by the schools of fish and flocks of birds’ social interaction in nature. As a hyperparameter tuning method, PSO is suggested to be utilized if your search space contains many non-categorical hyperparameters, each trial doesn’t take much time, and you have enough computational resources – especially parallel computing resources.

PSO is one of the most popular methods within the bigger swarm intelligence (SI) group of methods. There are various methods in SI that are inspired by the social interaction of animals in nature, such as herds of land animals, colonies of ants, flocks of birds, schools of fish, and many more. The common characteristics of SI methods are population-based, individuals within the population are relatively similar to each other, and the ability of the population to move in a specific direction systemically...