I am a PhD student at national university of Malaysia.. I have been involved in different heuristic optimization algorithms like PSO, GA, BSA, FFA,GSA ,and Latest by LSA ( which developed by our department)..
These algorithms are used in different applications like predictions and estimation in neural network...
If Your project is using neural network, then u can use one of the algorithms mentioned before to optimize:
1-learning rate
2- neurons in hidden layer
3-features selection
4- number of hidden layers