Mathematical Problems in Engineering
Volume 2011 (2011), Article ID 514756, 14 pages
http://dx.doi.org/10.1155/2011/514756
Research Article

Hybrid Taguchi-Differential Evolution Algorithm for Parameter Estimation of Differential Equation Models with Application to HIV Dynamics

1Department of Medical Information Management, Kaohsiung Medical University, 100 Shi-Chuan 1st Road, Kaohsiung 807, Taiwan
2Department of Pharmacy, Chi Mei Medical Center, 901 Chung Hwa Road, Yong Kang, Tainan 701, Taiwan

Received 5 June 2010; Revised 6 August 2010; Accepted 17 September 2010

Academic Editor: Marcelo Messias

Copyright © 2011 Wen-Hsien Ho and Agnes Lai-Fong Chan. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

This work emphasizes solving the problem of parameter estimation for a human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) dynamical model by using an improved differential evolution, which is called the hybrid Taguchi-differential evolution (HTDE). The HTDE, used to estimate parameters of an HIV dynamical model, can provide robust optimal solutions. In this work, the HTDE approach is effectively applied to solve the problem of parameter estimation for an HIV dynamical model and is also compared with the traditional differential evolution (DE) approach and the numerical methods presented in the literature. An illustrative example shows that the proposed HTDE gives an effective and robust way for obtaining optimal solution, and can get better results than the traditional DE approach and the numerical methods presented in the literature for an HIV dynamical model.