Differential evolution is an evolutionary algorithm that is used to solve complex numerical optimization problems. Differential evolution balances exploration and exploitation to find the best genes for the objective function. However, finding this balance is a challenging task. To overcome this challenge, we propose a clustering-based mutation strategy called Agglomerative Best Cluster Differential Evolution (ABCDE). The proposed model converges in an efficient manner without being trapped in local optima. It works by clustering the population to identify similar genes and avoids local optima. The adaptive crossover rate ensures that poor-quality genes are not reintroduced into the population. The proposed ABCDE is capable of generating a population efficiently where the difference between the values of the trial vector and objective vector is even less than 1% for some benchmark functions, and hence it outperforms both classical mutation strategies and the random neighborhood mutation strategy. The optimal and fast convergence of differential evolution has potential applications in the weight optimization of artificial neural networks and in stochastic and time-constrained environments such as cloud computing.

With the rapid growth of user-generated content on social media, several new research domains have emerged, and sentiment analysis (SA) is one of the active research areas due to its significance. In the field of feature-oriented sentiment analysis, both convolutional neural network (CNN) and gated recurrent unit (GRU) performed well. The former is widely used for local feature extraction, whereas the latter is suitable for extracting global contextual information or long-term dependencies. In existing studies, the focus has been to combine them as a single framework; however, these approaches fail to fairly distribute the features as inputs, such as word embedding, part-of-speech (PoS) tags, dependency relations, and contextual position information. To solve this issue, in this manuscript, we propose a technique that combines variant algorithms in a parallel manner and treats them equally to extract advantageous informative features, usually known as aspects, and then performs sentiment classification. Thus, the proposed methodology combines a multichannel convolutional neural network (MC-CNN) with a multichannel bidirectional gated recurrent unit (MC-Bi-GRU) and provides them with equal input parameters. In addition, sharing the information of hidden layers between parallelly combined algorithms becomes another cause of achieving the benefits of their combined abilities. These abilities make this approach distinctive and novel compared to the existing methodologies. An extensive empirical analysis carried out on several standard datasets confirms that the proposed technique outperforms the latest existing models.