Abstract: In this paper, to reduce the redundant attractions and incorrect directions of firefly algorithm (FA), a distance-guided selection approach (DSFA) is proposed, which consists of a distance-guided mechanism and selection strategy. Where the designed distance-guided mechanism reduces the attractions and plays as a classifier for global search and local search, the suggested selection strategy can avoid local search falling into traps, thereby increasing the probability of correct direction. With the good cooperation of these two approaches, DSFA obtains a good balance of exploration and exploitation. To confirm the performance of the proposed algorithm, excessive experiments are conducted on CEC2013 benchmark functions, large-scale optimization problems CEC2008, and software defect prediction (SDP). In the comparison with the 5 advanced FA variants, DSFA provides the optimal solutions to most CEC2013 problems. Besides, when facing the problems of class imbalance and the dimensional explosion of datasets, DSFA greatly improves the performance of machine learning classifiers employed by SDP. It can be concluded that DSFA is an effective method for global continuous optimization problems.
