Invited paper: A Review of Thresheld Convergence

A multi-modal search space can be defined as having multiple attraction basins – each basin has a single local optimum which is reached from all points in that basin when greedy local search is used. Optimization in multi-modal search spaces can then be viewed as a two-phase process. The first phase is exploration in which the most promising attraction basin is identified. The second phase is exploitation in which the best solution (i.e. the local optimum) within the previously identified attraction basin is attained. The goal of thresheld convergence is to improve the performance of search techniques during the first phase of exploration. The effectiveness of thresheld convergence has been demonstrated through applications to existing metaheuristics such as particle swarm optimization and differential evolution, and through the development of novel metaheuristics such as minimum population search and leaders and followers

Minimum Population Search, an Application to Molecular Docking

Computer modeling of protein-ligand interactions is one of the most important phases in a drug design process. Part of the process involves the optimization of highly multi-modal objective (scoring) functions. This research presents the Minimum Population Search heuristic as an alternative for solving these global unconstrained optimization problems. To determine the effectiveness of Minimum Population Search, a comparison with seven state-of-the-art search heuristics is performed. Being specifically designed for the optimization of large scale multi-modal problems, Minimum Population Search achieves excellent results on all of the tested complexes, especially when the amount of available function evaluations is strongly reduced. A first step is also made toward the design of hybrid algorithms based on the exploratory power of Minimum Population Search. Computational results show that hybridization leads to a further improvement in performance

Multi-objective optimization approach based on Minimum Population Search algorithm

URL del artículo en la web de la Revista: https://www.upo.es/revistas/index.php/gecontec/article/view/4049Minimum Population Search is a recently developed metaheuristic for optimization of mono-objective continuous problems, which has proven to be a very effective optimizing large scale and multi-modal problems. One of its key characteristic is the ability to perform an efficient exploration of large dimensional spaces. We assume that this feature may prove useful when optimizing multi-objective problems, thus this paper presents a study of how it can be adapted to a multi-objective approach. We performed experiments and comparisons with five multi-objective selection processes and we test the effectiveness of Thresheld Convergence on this class of problems. Following this analysis we suggest a Multi-objective variant of the algorithm. The proposed algorithm is compared with multi-objective evolutionary algorithms IBEA, NSGA2 and SPEA2 on several well-known test problems. Subsequently, we present two hybrid approaches with the IBEA and NSGA-II, these hybrids allow to further improve the achieved results.Universidad Pablo de Olavid