PONE-D-20-20957

On the performance improvement of Butterfly Optimization approaches for global optimization

PLOS ONE

Dear Dr. Assiri,

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We look forward to receiving your revised manuscript.

Kind regards,

Seyedali Mirjalili

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

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Reviewers' comments:

Reviewer's Responses to Questions

Comments to the Author

1. Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions?

The manuscript must describe a technically sound piece of scientific research with data that supports the conclusions. Experiments must have been conducted rigorously, with appropriate controls, replication, and sample sizes. The conclusions must be drawn appropriately based on the data presented.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

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2. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously?

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: No

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3. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available?

The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception (please refer to the Data Availability Statement in the manuscript PDF file). The data should be provided as part of the manuscript or its supporting information, or deposited to a public repository. For example, in addition to summary statistics, the data points behind means, medians and variance measures should be available. If there are restrictions on publicly sharing data—e.g. participant privacy or use of data from a third party—those must be specified.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

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4. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English?

PLOS ONE does not copyedit accepted manuscripts, so the language in submitted articles must be clear, correct, and unambiguous. Any typographical or grammatical errors should be corrected at revision, so please note any specific errors here.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

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5. Review Comments to the Author

Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters)

Reviewer #1: This is a good work, but a number of major and minor amendments are required as follows:

* Potential applications of the proposed CLSOBBOA should be discussed

* There is no justification of the CLSOBBOA method. Why for this problem area, please discuss. There are many other similar methods in the literature in this area, so such a justification is required.

* There is no statistical test to judge about the significance of the CLSOBBOA’s results. Without such a statistical test, the conclusion cannot be supported.

* There is no discussion on the cost effectiveness of the proposed CLSOBBOA method. What is the computational complexity? What is the runtime? Please include such discussions. You can also use the big oh notation to show the computation complexity.

* To have an unbiased view in the paper, there should be some discussions on the limitations of the proposed CLSOBBOA method

* Analysis of the results is missing in the paper. There is a big gap between the results and conclusion. There should be the result analysis between these two sections. After comparing the methods, you have to be able to analyse the results and relate them to the structure of all algorithms. It would be interesting to have your thoughts on why the method works that way? Such analyses would be the core of your work where you prove your understanding of the reason behind the results. You can also link the findings to the hypotheses of the paper. Long story short, this paper requires a very deep analysis from different perspectives

* How do you ensure that the comparison between CLSOBBOA and the comparative methods is fair?

* The proposed CLSOBBOA method might be sensitive to the values of its main controlling parameter. How did you tune the parameters?

* The main solution is an optimization, but the literature review of other metaheuristics is missing. Please provide an in-depth review to show readers a big picture of this field with recent and popular algorithms.

Some cosmetic comments:

* Avoid using first person.

* Highlights are missing.

* Avoid using abbreviations and acronyms in title, abstract, headings and highlights.

* Please avoid having heading after heading with nothing in between, either merge your headings or provide a small paragraph in between.

* Abstract is too short. Abstract should have one sentence per each: context and background, motivation, hypothesis, methods, results, conclusions.

* The first time you use an acronym in the text, please write the full name and the acronym in parenthesis. Do not use acronyms in the title, abstract, chapter headings and highlights.

* The results should be further elaborated to show how they could be used for the real applications.

* The originality of the paper needs to be further clarified.

Reviewer #2: The author have introduced three improved versions of BOA to prevent the original algorithm from getting trapped in local optima and have a good balance between exploration and exploitation abilities. However, there are few points have been raised though out the review that need to be addressed by the author as below.

1. Potential applications of the proposed method should be discussed

2. There is no justification of the method. Why for this problem area, please discuss. There are many other similar methods in the literature in this area, so such a justification is required.

3. There is no statistical test to judge about the significance of the method’s results. Without such a statistical test, the conclusion cannot be supported.

4. There is no discussion on the cost effectiveness of the proposed method. What is the computational complexity? What is the runtime? Please include such discussions. You can also use the big oh notation to show the computation complexity.

5. To have an unbiased view in the paper, there should be some discussions on the limitations of the proposed method

6. The proposed method might be sensitive to the values of its main controlling parameter. How did you tune the parameters?

7. The given discussion on the obtained results should be further improved, for example, there were some noticeable performance improvements, but the reasons behind are not cohesively discussed, improvements were presented as a rule of thumb. The authors should make linkage between the achieved improvement and the proposed methodology to make kind of justifications on why the results are significant?

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6. PLOS authors have the option to publish the peer review history of their article (what does this mean?). If published, this will include your full peer review and any attached files.

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Reviewer #1: No

Reviewer #2: No

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On the performance improvement of Butterfly Optimization approaches for global optimization and Feature Selection

PONE-D-20-20957R1

Dear Dr. Assiri,

We’re pleased to inform you that your manuscript has been judged scientifically suitable for publication and will be formally accepted for publication once it meets all outstanding technical requirements.

Within one week, you’ll receive an e-mail detailing the required amendments. When these have been addressed, you’ll receive a formal acceptance letter and your manuscript will be scheduled for publication.

An invoice for payment will follow shortly after the formal acceptance. To ensure an efficient process, please log into Editorial Manager at http://www.editorialmanager.com/pone/, click the 'Update My Information' link at the top of the page, and double check that your user information is up-to-date. If you have any billing related questions, please contact our Author Billing department directly at authorbilling@plos.org.

If your institution or institutions have a press office, please notify them about your upcoming paper to help maximize its impact. If they’ll be preparing press materials, please inform our press team as soon as possible -- no later than 48 hours after receiving the formal acceptance. Your manuscript will remain under strict press embargo until 2 pm Eastern Time on the date of publication. For more information, please contact onepress@plos.org.

Kind regards,

Seyedali Mirjalili

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

Additional Editor Comments (optional):

Reviewers' comments:

Reviewer's Responses to Questions

Comments to the Author

1. If the authors have adequately addressed your comments raised in a previous round of review and you feel that this manuscript is now acceptable for publication, you may indicate that here to bypass the “Comments to the Author” section, enter your conflict of interest statement in the “Confidential to Editor” section, and submit your "Accept" recommendation.

Reviewer #1: (No Response)

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2. Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions?

The manuscript must describe a technically sound piece of scientific research with data that supports the conclusions. Experiments must have been conducted rigorously, with appropriate controls, replication, and sample sizes. The conclusions must be drawn appropriately based on the data presented.

Reviewer #1: (No Response)

**********

3. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously?

Reviewer #1: (No Response)

**********

4. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available?

The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception (please refer to the Data Availability Statement in the manuscript PDF file). The data should be provided as part of the manuscript or its supporting information, or deposited to a public repository. For example, in addition to summary statistics, the data points behind means, medians and variance measures should be available. If there are restrictions on publicly sharing data—e.g. participant privacy or use of data from a third party—those must be specified.

Reviewer #1: (No Response)

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5. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English?

PLOS ONE does not copyedit accepted manuscripts, so the language in submitted articles must be clear, correct, and unambiguous. Any typographical or grammatical errors should be corrected at revision, so please note any specific errors here.

Reviewer #1: (No Response)

**********

6. Review Comments to the Author

Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters)

Reviewer #1: My comments have been addressed. Before uploading the final version or in the proof stage, please make sure to proofread the paper again to polish the language.

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7. PLOS authors have the option to publish the peer review history of their article (what does this mean?). If published, this will include your full peer review and any attached files.

If you choose “no”, your identity will remain anonymous but your review may still be made public.

Do you want your identity to be public for this peer review? For information about this choice, including consent withdrawal, please see our Privacy Policy.

Reviewer #1: No