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A Modified Imperialist Competitive Algorithm
for Digital IIR Filter Design
MohammadAli Sharifi
Department of Electrical, Computer and Biomedical
Engineering
Islamic Azad University, Qazvin Branch
Qazvin, Iran
m.sharifi6283@gmail.com
Abstract Digital infinite impulse response (IIR) filter have
become the target of growing interest, because they often provide
a much better performance and less computational cost than
finite impulse response (FIR) filters. Since the problem of error
surface of designing Digital IIR filters is generally nonlinear and
multimodal, global optimization techniques are required in order
to avoid local minima. In this paper, an evolutionary method
based on Imperialist Competitive Algorithm (ICA) has been
proposed to design Digital IIR filters. By adding a step to the
standard ICA algorithm, its performance has been improved in
searching solution space and convergence to the global minima.
Simulation results show the efficiency of the proposed method to
design Digital IIR filter.
Index Terms IIR digital filter, Adaptive filter, System
identification, Optimization, Imperialist Competitive Algorithm.
I.INTRODUCTION
Digital IIR filters are useful in a wide range of applications
where a highly-selective processing of discrete signals is
desirable. They are used to modify, reshape, or manipulate the
frequency spectrum of a signal according to some desired
specifications. These filters often provide a much better
performance and less computational cost than FIR filters [1-3].
A major concern in IIR filter design is that the cost function
of design problem has generally multimodal error surface. This
multimodal error surface causes the design process to get stuck
in local minima easily and prevents it to converge to global
optimum. In order to deal with this problem, a design method
is required to achieve global minima in a multi-modal error
surface. In recent years, evolutionary algorithms have been
employed to find global optimum and scape from local
minimum in a nonlinear searching space for multimodal
optimization problem and adaptive filtering. Some employed
ones include genetic algorithm (GA) [4], harmony search
algorithm (HS) [5], particle swarm optimization algorithm
(PSO) [6] and ICA [7].
ICA is a meta-heuristic algorithm which was inspired by
the process of socio-political evolution. Like other population
,(((
Hamed Mojallali
Electrical Engineering Department
Faculty of Engineering
University of Guilan
Rasht, Iran
mojallali@guilan.ac.ir
based algorithms, the ICA starts with a random generated
population called countries. The countries with best costs are
considered as imperialists and the rest of them are called
colonies. Movement of the colonies toward their related
imperialist and imperialistic competition among the empires
form the basis of the ICA. These mechanisms make population
to converge to certain spots in the search space where the best
solution founded so far are located.
Exploration and exploitation are two major concepts in
evolutionary algorithms. More exploration results in creating
more solution candidate in the search space which helps the
algorithm to escape from local minima. On the contrary,
exploitation improves existing solutions and results in fast
convergence in these algorithms. For instance, in GA,
crossover and mutation operators provide exploitation and
exploration, respectively. Also, lower and upper values for
learning factors result in better exploitation and exploration in
PSO algorithm, respectively. In addition, appropriate
modification in evolutionary algorithms can improve
exploration and exploitation concepts. Changing operators and
steps and also adding some steps to the existing steps are
examples of appropriate modification in these algorithms [8-
10].
In this paper, performance of standard ICA has been
improved by an additional step. This modification improves
exploration and exploitation and results in better balance
between these two concepts. Application of the modified ICA
(MICA) for designing digital IIR filters shows the performance
of MICA to find better solution and escape from local minima.
The remainder of the paper is organized as follows. The
problem of digital IIR filter design is described in section 2. In
section 3, the standard ICA is introduced and then MICA is
presented. Section 4 investigates the application of this
modified algorithm to design digital IIR filter. Then, the
simulation results are compared to the results obtained from
other optimization algorithms such as differential evolution
(DE), PSO, standard ICA, orthogonal ICA (OICA) [11] and
ICA combined with GA (GAICA) [9].

 II.STATEMENT OF THE PROBLEM based on the probability of each one. The initial countries are
The relation between input, output and the transfer formed according to Eq. 4.
function of digital IIR filter is as the following:
x = xmin + (xmax xmin ) rand (1, nvar) (4)
y(n) = U
k=0 bk x nk - V
k=0 ak y nk (1)
where xmin and xmax are lower and upper limits,
respectively. nvar is the number of problem parameters that is
U
k=0 bk Z
-k
H(z) = (2) going to be determined. rand (1, nvar) is a random vector.
-k
1+ V
k=1 ak Z Forming initial empires, imperialists started to improve their
colonies. This fact has been modeled by moving all colonies
where ak and bk are filter coefficients, x(n) and y(n) are toward their imperialist. Figure 2 shows the colonies
input and output, respectively. In digital IIR filter design, the movement toward their imperialist. Also, the relation of this
desired system is unknown. Therefore, the design process is movement is shown in Eq. 5.
defined as a system identification problem as shown in Fig. 1
[12 -14]. In fact, digital IIR filter designing problem is
introduced as minimization of a cost function defined as mean
squared error (MSE) according to Eq. 3. When this error
function reaches its minimum value, optimum weights are
obtained for the filter.
1 2
J= kN= 1 d(k) y(k)
N
Fig. 1. Block diagram of system identification process using adaptive IIR
filter.
III.MODIFIED IMPERIALIST COMPETITIVE ALGORITHM
A. Standard imperialist competitive algorithm
ICA, introduced by Atashpaz and Lucas [7], is a new
evolutionary optimization method which is inspired by
imperialistic competition. Movement of the colonies toward
their related imperialist and imperialistic competition among
the empires form basis of the ICA. These mechanisms cause
initial population to converge to certain spots in the search
space where the best solution founded so far are located.
Like other evolutionary algorithms, it starts with an initial
population called country. Then, this population is divided into
two types of colonies and imperialists which all together form
empires. Some countries with lower cost are determined as
imperialist and other countries are allocated to each imperialist
x' = x + {r} (t x) 
Where is greater than 1 and close to 2; > 2 values cause
instability [7]. {r} is a random vector and its dimensions is
equal to the problem dimension. It is used to cause deviation on
the way of movement. t and x are the imperialist and colony
(3) positions respectively.
Fig. 2. Movement of colonies to its new location in the standard ICA [7].
The next step in revolution. It causes a country to have a
suddenly change in its socio-political characteristics. It is
modeled by random movement of a colony and getting placed
at a new random position. This random movement results in
exploration and creating new solution candidates to escape
from local minima. Figure 3 describes the random changes in
colonies position. Equation 6 shows how revolution changes
colonies position.
x ~ N(x, ) ~ x + N(0 , 1) (6)
where N(0,1) is a random number between 0 and 1 with
normal distribution. is the step length and its value is often
considered to be equal to (xmax xmin) where is almost
equal to 0.1 [7].
After revolution step, the position of a colony is checked in
each empire. If a colony has better position than imperialist, the
imperialist country is replaced by the colony.


Fig. 3. Revolution in colonies [10].
Then, total power of each empire is calculated as the
imperialist power plus a percentage of the colonies total power
as shown in Eq. 7.
learning factors a1 and a2 are set 1.5 and 2.5 respectively.
Although this relation is almost like particle velocity relation in
PSO algorithm, there are some differences between them. In
PSO, particle velocity is related to best position of the particle
and the best position of whole particle swarms' best position.
But, in our modified ICA according to the Eq. 8, new position
of each colony is related to the vectors between the colony
toward its imperialist and the best imperialist.
As the assimilation step causes population convergence to
location of the best solution founded so far in the search space,
additional step in MICA improves the colonies obtained from
assimilation and revolution and converges them to better
solution found so far. Also, choosing appropriate values for a1
and a2 provides better exploration and exploitation to escape
from local minima and converge to global minimum. Figure 4
shows the colony movement toward its new location in
additional step. Pseudo-code of MICA is shown in Fig. 5.

total cost = f (imp)+ mean (f(col))

determines more or less imperialist or colony role in the

emperor objective function. Its value is less than one [7]. In
each iteration the weakest imperialist loses one of its colonies
and a more powerful one which is determined through a
selection method like roulette wheel selection gradually add
this colony to their colonies. When an imperialist loses all its
colonies, it becomes the colony of one of the imperialists.
These stages are repeated frequently until stopping criteria is
satisfied.
B. Modified imperialist competitive algorithm
In this paper, performance of ICA has been improved by
adding a step. In this modified version of ICA, after
exchanging position between the colony with better position
and imperialist, the best imperialist among the imperialists is
determined and new position of each colony is calculated as
Eq. 8.
xnew = xold + rand1 a1 (xImp - xCol ) + rand2 a2 (xbestImp -
xCol ) (8)
xImp and xbestImp are the positions of the related imperialist of
the colony and the best imperialist in that iteration,
respectively. rand1 and rand2 are random numbers between 0 to
1. a1 and a2 are learning factors which determine the
effectiveness of (xImp - xCol ) and (xbestImp - xCol ) vectors in the
movement. The larger values for a1 and a2 are applied for fine
exploration of a region while smaller values result in fine
exploitation and faster convergence. So, they can adopt various
values to reach better exploitation or exploration. In this paper,
to increase the effectiveness of movement toward the best
imperialist (best solution has been ever found), a2 is set larger
Fig. 4.  Movement of colonies to its new location in the modified ICA.
IV.SIMULATION RESULTS
This section investigates the utilization of MICA to design
Digital IIR filters. Then, simulation results are compared with
the results obtained from other evolutionary algorithms. Each
algorithm is evaluated for 100 times; minimums, means,
maximums and standard deviations of errors are shown in
tables. High and low value of the filter coefficients for the
system is +2 and -2, respectively. For PSO algorithm,
population number is 80; Inertia weight is 0.9. c1 and c2 are set
2.05. Number of countries and imperialists in ICA and MICA
are 80 and 8, respectively. Probability of revolution occurrence
is 0.1. In MICA, Learning factors a1 and a2 are set 1.5 and 2.5,
respectively.
Example 1: The system and filter transfer functions are,
respectively [2, 15]
1 0.4 z -2 - 0.65 z -4 + 0.26 z -6
Hd z-1 = (9)
1 0.77 z -2 - 0.8498 z -4 + 0.6486 z -6

than a1. Also, to reach better exploration to escape from local

b0 + b1 z -1 + b2 z -2 + b3 z -3 + b4 z -4 + b5 z -5
minima and better exploitation to improve existing solutions H z-1 = 
and to make better balance between these two concepts, the 1 + a1 z -1 + a2 z -2 + a3 z -3 + a4 z -4 + a5 z -5


 TABLE I. RESULTS OF DIFFERENT ALGORITHMS FOR EXAMPLE 1.

Approach Min Mean Max SD

DE 0.21338 0.39875 0.8504 0.11667

PSO 0.094362 0.35613 1.8726 0.28653

ICA 0.16462 0.46374 1.6796 0.298

OICA 0.11391 0.41083 1.3535 0.26594

GAICA 0.14241 0.56876 1.6469 0.34174

MICA 0.03279 0.22964 1.6094 0.28211

Fig. 5. Pseudo-code of MICA.

The input to the system and the filter is a white-noise

sequence; the data length is N = 100; white-Gaussian noise
with zero mean and unit variance is added to output of the
desired filter with 20dB SNR; Iteration number is 6000. The
filter transfer function order is less than the desired one. So, the
error surface is multimodal.
Table I shows minimums, means, maximums and standard
deviations of errors values for different evolutionary
algorithms. Figure 6 indicates the comparison between errors
obtained from different algorithms in 100 evaluations.
According to the Table I and Fig. 6, the minimum cost
obtained from MICA algorithm is 0.22964 which is lower than
other algorithms.
Example 2: Digital IIR filter and desired filter transfer
functions are given in equations 11 and 12, respectively [3, 15].
1 1.8 z -2 + 1.04 z -4 + 0.05 z -5 + 0.192 z -6
Hd z-1 =
1 0.8 z -2 - 0.17 z -4 - 0.56 z -6
b0 + b1 z -1 + b2 z -2 + b3 z -3 + b4 z -4 + b5 z -5
H z-1 =
1 + a1 z -1 + a2 z -2 + a3 z -3 + a4 z -4 + a5 z -5
Fig. 6. Normalized cost function value versus number of cost function
iterations averaged over 100 random runs of different algorithms
(Example 1).
The input to the system and the filter is a white-noise
sequence; the data length is N = 1000; SNR is 30dB for
additional white-Gaussian noise with zero mean and unit
variance to the output of desired filter; Iteration number is 500.
Since the reduced order filter is employed for the identification,
the error surface is multi-modal.
Table II shows minimums, means, maximums and standard
(11)
deviations of errors values for different evolutionary
algorithms. Figure 7 indicates the comparison of errors
obtained from different algorithms in 100 evaluations.
(12)
Comparing six algorithms, the MSE of the MICA is 0.13
which is better than the other algorithms. Also, the superiority
of MICA to reach minimum cost is shown in Fig. 7.


 TABLE II. RESULTS OF DIFFERENT ALGORITHMS FOR EXAMPLE 2. TABLE III. RESULTS OF DIFFERENT ALGORITHMS FOR EXAMPLE 3.

Approach Min Mean Max SD Approach Min Mean Max SD

DE 0.20774 0.28983 0.36614 0.030403 DE 2.0621e-005 0.00022916 0.0012309 0.00021096

PSO 0.088339 0.25279 0.3426 0.055488 PSO 2.728e-005 0.00022163 3.9569e-005

7.8908e-007

ICA 0.11009 0.21189 0.31927 0.053804 ICA 0.0019267 0.015781 0.0028352

1.3831e-006

OICA 0.098886 0.18841 0.30411 0.050093 OICA 0.0059582

2.2445e-006 0.00099203 0.0012911

GAICA 0.10417 0.21143 0.32781 0.062821

GAICA 5.4514e-008 0.00050732 0.0051602 0.00086285

MICA 0.076191 0.13884 0.31075 0.049566

MICA 2.6923e-026 7.8852e-020 3.2937e-018 3.8218e-019

Fig. 7. Normalized cost function value versus number of cost function

iterations averaged over 100 random runs of different algorithms
(Example 2). Fig. 8. Normalized cost function value versus number of cost function
iterations averaged over 100 random runs of different algorithms
Example 3: Digital IIR filter and desired filter transfer (Example 3).
function are given in equations 13 and 14 respectively [2, 15].
V.CONCLUSION
-1 0.05 0.4 z -1 The presented study describes a modified version of ICA
Hd z = (13)
1 1.1314 z -1 + 0.25 z -2 (MICA). The difference between MICA and standard ICA is
b0 b z -1 an extra step which results in better exploration and
H z-1 = (14)
1 + a0 z -1 + a1 z -2 exploitation and a good balance between these two major
concepts. This modified ICA was applied to design of digital
The input to the system and the filter is a white-Gaussian IIR filter in three examples. The comparison of simulation
noise with zero mean and unit variance which its data length is results obtained from MICA and some evolutionary
N = 1000; Iteration number is 200. algorithms show the effectiveness of the MICA to escape from
Table III and Fig. 8 show the mean square error (MSE) local minima and converge faster to the global minima.
averaged over 100 different runs. The error value of modified
ICA is considerably less than other algorithms. Also, the
convergence speed of MICA to global minima is superior to
other ones.


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