A two-step method for nonlinear polynomial model identification based on evolutionary optimization

A two-step identification method for nonlinear polynomial model using Evolutionary Algorithm (EA) is proposed in this paper, and the method has the ability to select a parsimonious structure from a very large pool of model terms. In a nonlinear polynomial model, the number of candidate monomial terms increases drastically as the order of polynomial model increases, and it is impossible to obtain the accurate model structure directly even with state-of-art algorithms. The proposed method firstly carries out a pre-screening process to select a reasonable number of important monomial terms based on the importance index. In the next step, EA is applied to determine a set of significant terms to be included in the polynomial model. In this way, the whole identification algorithm is implemented very efficiently. Numerical simulations are carried out to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed identification method.