The famous McCulloch–Pitts neuron model has been criticized for being overly simplistic in the long term. At the same time, the dendritic neuron model (DNM) has been shown to be effective in prediction problems, and it accounts for the nonlinear information-processing capacity of synapses and dendrites. Furthermore, since the classical error back-propagation (BP) algorithm typically experiences problems caused by the overabundance of saddle points and local minima traps, an efficient learning approach for DNMs remains desirable but difficult to implement. In addition to BP, the mainstream DNM-optimization methods include meta-heuristic algorithms (MHAs). However, over the decades, MHAs have developed a large number of different algorithms. How to screen suitable MHAs for optimizing DNMs has become a hot and challenging area of research. In this study, we classify MHAs into different clusters with different population interaction networks (PINs). The performance of DNMs optimized by different clusters of MHAs is tested in the financial time-series-forecasting task. According to the experimental results, the DNM optimized by MHAs with power-law-distributed PINs outperforms the DNM trained based on the BP algorithm.