PMSOMA: optical microscope algorithm based on piecewise linear chaotic mapping and sparse adaptive exploration.

The optical microscope algorithm (OMA) is a metaheuristic algorithm that draws inspiration from the magnifying functionality of optical microscopes. This study introduces an enhanced variant of OMA, termed PMSOMA, designed to mitigate the original version's limitations, notably its slow convergence rates and vulnerability to local optima. PMSOMA integrates a piecewise linear chaotic map to refine population initialization and augment diversity, alongside a sparse adaptive exploration mechanism to bolster search efficacy. The performance of PMSOMA was rigorously tested using a suite of 50 benchmark functions, the CEC2017 test suite, feature selection datasets, and three classical engineering challenges. The empirical findings confirm that PMSOMA surpasses both the original OMA and competing algorithms by delivering superior solutions, accelerating convergence, and demonstrating enhanced robustness in convergence.