Using spatial neighborhoods for parameter adaptation: An improved success history based differential evolution

•In the Success-History based adaptive DE (SHADE) algorithmic framework, we propose a very basic, yet successful, nearest spatial neighborhood-based adjustment to the adaptation process of the parameters.•Our proposed modifications can be extended to any SHADE-based DE algorithm like L-SHADE (SHADE with linear population size reduction), jSO (L-SHADE with modified mutation) etc.•The effectiveness of the proposed spatial neighborhood based parameter adaptation scheme is showcased on the IEEE Congress on Evolutionary Computation (CEC) 2013, 2014, 2015, and 2017 benchmark suites.•Furthermore, the IEEE CEC 2011 competition on testing evolutionary algorithms on real-world numerical optimization problem benchmark suite is considered.