10. Filter Design

System identification is a complex optimization problem which has recently attracted the attention in the field of science and engineering. In particular, the use of infinite impulse response (IIR) models for identification is preferred over their equivalent FIR (finite impulse response) models since the former yield more accurate models of physical plants for real world applications. However, IIR structures tend to produce multimodal error surfaces for which their cost functions are significantly difficult to minimize. Evolutionary computation techniques (ECT) are used to estimate the solution to complex optimization problems. They are often designed to meet the requirements of particular problems because no single optimization algorithm can solve all problems competitively. Therefore, when new algorithms are proposed, their relative efficacies must be appropriately evaluated. Several comparisons among ECT have been reported in the literature. Nevertheless, they suffer from one limitation: their conclusions are based on the performance of popular evolutionary approaches over a set of synthetic functions with exact solutions and well-known behaviors, without considering the application context neither including recent developments. This study presents the comparison of various evolutionary computation optimization techniques applied to IIR model identification. In the comparison, special attention is paid to recently developed algorithms such as Cuckoo Search and Flower Pollination Algorithm, including also popular approaches. Results over several models are presented and statistically validated.