77,823 research outputs found
Financial contagion: Evolutionary optimisation of a multinational agent-based model
Over the past two decades, financial market crises with similar features have occurred in different regions of the world. Unstable cross-market linkages during a crisis are referred to as financial contagion. We simulate crisis transmission in the context of a model of market participants adopting various strategies; this allows testing for financial contagion under alternative scenarios. Using a minority game approach, we develop an agent-based multinational model and investigate the reasons for contagion. Although the phenomenon has been extensively investigated in the financial literature, it has not been studied through computational intelligence techniques. Our simulations shed light on parameter values and characteristics which can be exploited to detect contagion at an earlier stage, hence recognising financial crises with the potential to destabilise cross-market linkages. In the real world, such information would be extremely valuable in developing appropriate risk management strategies
Fuzzy Adaptive Tuning of a Particle Swarm Optimization Algorithm for Variable-Strength Combinatorial Test Suite Generation
Combinatorial interaction testing is an important software testing technique
that has seen lots of recent interest. It can reduce the number of test cases
needed by considering interactions between combinations of input parameters.
Empirical evidence shows that it effectively detects faults, in particular, for
highly configurable software systems. In real-world software testing, the input
variables may vary in how strongly they interact, variable strength
combinatorial interaction testing (VS-CIT) can exploit this for higher
effectiveness. The generation of variable strength test suites is a
non-deterministic polynomial-time (NP) hard computational problem
\cite{BestounKamalFuzzy2017}. Research has shown that stochastic
population-based algorithms such as particle swarm optimization (PSO) can be
efficient compared to alternatives for VS-CIT problems. Nevertheless, they
require detailed control for the exploitation and exploration trade-off to
avoid premature convergence (i.e. being trapped in local optima) as well as to
enhance the solution diversity. Here, we present a new variant of PSO based on
Mamdani fuzzy inference system
\cite{Camastra2015,TSAKIRIDIS2017257,KHOSRAVANIAN2016280}, to permit adaptive
selection of its global and local search operations. We detail the design of
this combined algorithm and evaluate it through experiments on multiple
synthetic and benchmark problems. We conclude that fuzzy adaptive selection of
global and local search operations is, at least, feasible as it performs only
second-best to a discrete variant of PSO, called DPSO. Concerning obtaining the
best mean test suite size, the fuzzy adaptation even outperforms DPSO
occasionally. We discuss the reasons behind this performance and outline
relevant areas of future work.Comment: 21 page
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Automated generation of computationally hard feature models using evolutionary algorithms
This is the post-print version of the final paper published in Expert Systems with Applications. The published article is available from the link below. Changes resulting from the publishing process, such as peer review, editing, corrections, structural formatting, and other quality control mechanisms may not be reflected in this document. Changes may have been made to this work since it was submitted for publication. Copyright @ 2014 Elsevier B.V.A feature model is a compact representation of the products of a software product line. The automated extraction of information from feature models is a thriving topic involving numerous analysis operations, techniques and tools. Performance evaluations in this domain mainly rely on the use of random feature models. However, these only provide a rough idea of the behaviour of the tools with average problems and are not sufficient to reveal their real strengths and weaknesses. In this article, we propose to model the problem of finding computationally hard feature models as an optimization problem and we solve it using a novel evolutionary algorithm for optimized feature models (ETHOM). Given a tool and an analysis operation, ETHOM generates input models of a predefined size maximizing aspects such as the execution time or the memory consumption of the tool when performing the operation over the model. This allows users and developers to know the performance of tools in pessimistic cases providing a better idea of their real power and revealing performance bugs. Experiments using ETHOM on a number of analyses and tools have successfully identified models producing much longer executions times and higher memory consumption than those obtained with random models of identical or even larger size.European Commission (FEDER), the Spanish Government and
the Andalusian Government
Coevolutive adaptation of fitness landscape for solving the testing problem
IEEE International Conference on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics. Nashville, TN, 8-11 October 2000A general framework, called Uniform Coevolution, is introduced to overcome the testing problem in evolutionary computation methods. This framework is based on competitive evolution ideas where the solution and example sets are evolving by means of a competition to generate difficult test beds for the solutions in a gradual way. The method has been tested with two different problems: the robot navigation problem and the density parity problem in cellular automata. In both test cases using evolutive methods, the examples used in the learning process biased the solutions found. The main characteristics of the Uniform Coevolution method are that it smoothes the fitness landscape and, that it obtains âideal learner examplesâ. Results using uniform coevolution show a high value of generality, compared with non co-evolutive approaches
Sentinel: A Hyper-Heuristic for the Generation of Mutant Reduction Strategies
Mutation testing is an effective approach to evaluate and strengthen software
test suites, but its adoption is currently limited by the mutants' execution
computational cost. Several strategies have been proposed to reduce this cost
(a.k.a. mutation cost reduction strategies), however none of them has proven to
be effective for all scenarios since they often need an ad-hoc manual selection
and configuration depending on the software under test (SUT). In this paper, we
propose a novel multi-objective evolutionary hyper-heuristic approach, dubbed
Sentinel, to automate the generation of optimal cost reduction strategies for
every new SUT. We evaluate Sentinel by carrying out a thorough empirical study
involving 40 releases of 10 open-source real-world software systems and both
baseline and state-of-the-art strategies as a benchmark. We execute a total of
4,800 experiments, and evaluate their results with both quality indicators and
statistical significance tests, following the most recent best practice in the
literature. The results show that strategies generated by Sentinel outperform
the baseline strategies in 95% of the cases always with large effect sizes.
They also obtain statistically significantly better results than
state-of-the-art strategies in 88% of the cases, with large effect sizes for
95% of them. Also, our study reveals that the mutation strategies generated by
Sentinel for a given software version can be used without any loss in quality
for subsequently developed versions in 95% of the cases. These results show
that Sentinel is able to automatically generate mutation strategies that reduce
mutation testing cost without affecting its testing effectiveness (i.e.
mutation score), thus taking off from the tester's shoulders the burden of
manually selecting and configuring strategies for each SUT.Comment: in IEEE Transactions on Software Engineerin
Generative Adversarial Networks for Financial Trading Strategies Fine-Tuning and Combination
Systematic trading strategies are algorithmic procedures that allocate assets
aiming to optimize a certain performance criterion. To obtain an edge in a
highly competitive environment, the analyst needs to proper fine-tune its
strategy, or discover how to combine weak signals in novel alpha creating
manners. Both aspects, namely fine-tuning and combination, have been
extensively researched using several methods, but emerging techniques such as
Generative Adversarial Networks can have an impact into such aspects.
Therefore, our work proposes the use of Conditional Generative Adversarial
Networks (cGANs) for trading strategies calibration and aggregation. To this
purpose, we provide a full methodology on: (i) the training and selection of a
cGAN for time series data; (ii) how each sample is used for strategies
calibration; and (iii) how all generated samples can be used for ensemble
modelling. To provide evidence that our approach is well grounded, we have
designed an experiment with multiple trading strategies, encompassing 579
assets. We compared cGAN with an ensemble scheme and model validation methods,
both suited for time series. Our results suggest that cGANs are a suitable
alternative for strategies calibration and combination, providing
outperformance when the traditional techniques fail to generate any alpha
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