87 research outputs found
A Random Forest Assisted Evolutionary Algorithm for Data-Driven Constrained Multi-Objective Combinatorial Optimization of Trauma Systems for publication
Many real-world optimization problems can be
solved by using the data-driven approach only, simply because no
analytic objective functions are available for evaluating candidate
solutions. In this work, we address a class of expensive datadriven
constrained multi-objective combinatorial optimization
problems, where the objectives and constraints can be calculated
only on the basis of large amount of data. To solve this class
of problems, we propose to use random forests and radial basis
function networks as surrogates to approximate both objective
and constraint functions. In addition, logistic regression models
are introduced to rectify the surrogate-assisted fitness evaluations
and a stochastic ranking selection is adopted to further reduce
the influences of the approximated constraint functions. Three
variants of the proposed algorithm are empirically evaluated on
multi-objective knapsack benchmark problems and two realworld
trauma system design problems. Experimental results
demonstrate that the variant using random forest models as
the surrogates are effective and efficient in solving data-driven
constrained multi-objective combinatorial optimization problems
Evolutionary computation for expensive optimization: a survey
Expensive optimization problem (EOP) widely exists in various significant real-world applications. However, EOP requires expensive or even unaffordable costs for evaluating candidate solutions, which is expensive for the algorithm to find a satisfactory solution. Moreover, due to the fast-growing application demands in the economy and society, such as the emergence of the smart cities, the internet of things, and the big data era, solving EOP more efficiently has become increasingly essential in various fields, which poses great challenges on the problem-solving ability of optimization approach for EOP. Among various optimization approaches, evolutionary computation (EC) is a promising global optimization tool widely used for solving EOP efficiently in the past decades. Given the fruitful advancements of EC for EOP, it is essential to review these advancements in order to synthesize and give previous research experiences and references to aid the development of relevant research fields and real-world applications. Motivated by this, this paper aims to provide a comprehensive survey to show why and how EC can solve EOP efficiently. For this aim, this paper firstly analyzes the total optimization cost of EC in solving EOP. Then, based on the analysis, three promising research directions are pointed out for solving EOP, which are problem approximation and substitution, algorithm design and enhancement, and parallel and distributed computation. Note that, to the best of our knowledge, this paper is the first that outlines the possible directions for efficiently solving EOP by analyzing the total expensive cost. Based on this, existing works are reviewed comprehensively via a taxonomy with four parts, including the above three research directions and the real-world application part. Moreover, some future research directions are also discussed in this paper. It is believed that such a survey can attract attention, encourage discussions, and stimulate new EC research ideas for solving EOP and related real-world applications more efficiently
Large Language Model for Multi-objective Evolutionary Optimization
Multiobjective evolutionary algorithms (MOEAs) are major methods for solving
multiobjective optimization problems (MOPs). Many MOEAs have been proposed in
the past decades, of which the search operators need a carefully handcrafted
design with domain knowledge. Recently, some attempts have been made to replace
the manually designed operators in MOEAs with learning-based operators (e.g.,
neural network models). However, much effort is still required for designing
and training such models, and the learned operators might not generalize well
on new problems. To tackle the above challenges, this work investigates a novel
approach that leverages the powerful large language model (LLM) to design MOEA
operators. With proper prompt engineering, we successfully let a general LLM
serve as a black-box search operator for decomposition-based MOEA (MOEA/D) in a
zero-shot manner. In addition, by learning from the LLM behavior, we further
design an explicit white-box operator with randomness and propose a new version
of decomposition-based MOEA, termed MOEA/D-LO. Experimental studies on
different test benchmarks show that our proposed method can achieve competitive
performance with widely used MOEAs. It is also promising to see the operator
only learned from a few instances can have robust generalization performance on
unseen problems with quite different patterns and settings. The results reveal
the potential benefits of using pre-trained LLMs in the design of MOEAs
Probabilistic Selection Approaches in Decomposition-based Evolutionary Algorithms for Offline Data-Driven Multiobjective Optimization
This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from IEEE via the DOI in this recordIn offline data-driven multiobjective optimization, no new data is available during the optimization process. Approximation models, also known as surrogates, are built using the provided offline data. A multiobjective evolutionary algorithm can be utilized to find solutions by using these surrogates. The accuracy of the approximated solutions depends on the surrogates and approximations typically involve uncertainties. In this paper, we propose probabilistic selection approaches that utilize the uncertainty information of the Kriging models (as surrogates) to improve the solution process in offline data-driven multiobjective optimization. These approaches are designed for decomposition-based multiobjective evolutionary algorithms and can, thus, handle a large number of objectives. The proposed approaches were tested on distance-based visualizable test problems and the DTLZ suite. The proposed approaches produced solutions with a greater hypervolume, and a lower root mean squared error compared to generic approaches and a transfer learning approach that do not use uncertainty information
Boosting data-driven evolutionary algorithm with localized data generation
By efficiently building and exploiting surrogates, data-driven evolutionary algorithms (DDEAs) can be very helpful in solving expensive and computationally intensive problems. However, they still often suffer from two difficulties. First, many existing methods for building a single ad hoc surrogate are suitable for some special problems but may not work well on some other problems. Second, the optimization accuracy of DDEAs deteriorates if available data are not enough for building accurate surrogates, which is common in expensive optimization problems. To this end, this article proposes a novel DDEA with two efficient components. First, a boosting strategy (BS) is proposed for self-aware model managements, which can iteratively build and combine surrogates to obtain suitable surrogate models for different problems. Second, a localized data generation (LDG) method is proposed to generate synthetic data to alleviate data shortage and increase data quantity, which is achieved by approximating fitness through data positions. By integrating the BS and the LDG, the BDDEA-LDG algorithm is able to improve model accuracy and data quantity at the same time automatically according to the problems at hand. Besides, a tradeoff is empirically considered to strike a better balance between the effectiveness of surrogates and the time cost for building them. The experimental results show that the proposed BDDEA-LDG algorithm can generally outperform both traditional methods without surrogates and other state-of-the-art DDEA son widely used benchmarks and an arterial traffic signal timing real-world optimization problem. Furthermore, the proposed BDDEA-LDG algorithm can use only about 2% computational budgets of traditional methods for producing competitive results
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