Balanced Grey Wolf Optimizer Algorithm for Backpropagation Neural Networks

Backpropagation Neural Networks (BPNNs) are widely used in fault diagnosis and parameter prediction due to their simple structure and strong universal approximation capabilities. However, BPNNs suffer from slow convergence and susceptibility to poor local minima under basic gradient descent settings. To address these issues, this paper proposes a Balanced Grey Wolf Optimizer (BGWO) as an alternative to gradient descent for training BPNNs. This paper proposes a novel stochastic position update formula and a novel nonlinear convergence factor to balance the local exploitation and global exploration of the traditional Grey Wolf Optimizer. After exploration, the optimal convergence coefficient is determined. The test results on the six benchmark functions demonstrate that BGWO achieves better objective function values under fixed iteration settings. Based on BGWO, this paper constructs a training method for BPNN. Finally, three public datasets are used to test the BPNN trained with BGWO (BGWO-BPNN), the BPNN trained with Levenberg–Marquardt, and the traditional BPNN. The relative error and mean absolute percentage error of BPNNs’ prediction results are used for comparison. The Wilcoxon test is also performed. The test results show that, under the experimental settings of this paper, BGWO-BPNN achieves superior predictive performance. This demonstrates certain advantages of BGWO-BPNN.