7,823 research outputs found
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Combinatorial optimization and metaheuristics
Today, combinatorial optimization is one of the youngest and most active areas of discrete mathematics. It is a branch of optimization in applied mathematics and computer science, related to operational research, algorithm theory and computational complexity theory. It sits at the intersection of several fields, including artificial intelligence, mathematics and software engineering. Its increasing interest arises for the fact that a large number of scientific and industrial problems can be formulated as abstract combinatorial optimization problems, through graphs and/or (integer) linear programs. Some of these problems have polynomial-time (âefficientâ) algorithms, while most of them are NP-hard, i.e. it is not proved that they can be solved in polynomial-time. Mainly, it means that it is not possible to guarantee that an exact solution to the problem can be found and one has to settle for an approximate solution with known performance guarantees. Indeed, the goal of approximate methods is to find âquicklyâ (reasonable run-times), with âhighâ probability, provable âgoodâ solutions (low error from the real optimal solution). In the last 20 years, a new kind of algorithm commonly called metaheuristics have emerged in this class, which basically try to combine heuristics in high level frameworks aimed at efficiently and effectively exploring the search space. This report briefly outlines the components, concepts, advantages and disadvantages of different metaheuristic approaches from a conceptual point of view, in order to analyze their similarities and differences. The two very significant forces of intensification and diversification, that mainly determine the behavior of a metaheuristic, will be pointed out. The report concludes by exploring the importance of hybridization and integration methods
Metaheuristic design of feedforward neural networks: a review of two decades of research
Over the past two decades, the feedforward neural network (FNN) optimization has been a key interest among the researchers and practitioners of multiple disciplines. The FNN optimization is often viewed from the various perspectives: the optimization of weights, network architecture, activation nodes, learning parameters, learning environment, etc. Researchers adopted such different viewpoints mainly to improve the FNN's generalization ability. The gradient-descent algorithm such as backpropagation has been widely applied to optimize the FNNs. Its success is evident from the FNN's application to numerous real-world problems. However, due to the limitations of the gradient-based optimization methods, the metaheuristic algorithms including the evolutionary algorithms, swarm intelligence, etc., are still being widely explored by the researchers aiming to obtain generalized FNN for a given problem. This article attempts to summarize a broad spectrum of FNN optimization methodologies including conventional and metaheuristic approaches. This article also tries to connect various research directions emerged out of the FNN optimization practices, such as evolving neural network (NN), cooperative coevolution NN, complex-valued NN, deep learning, extreme learning machine, quantum NN, etc. Additionally, it provides interesting research challenges for future research to cope-up with the present information processing era
Detecting Multiple Communities Using Quantum Annealing on the D-Wave System
A very important problem in combinatorial optimization is partitioning a
network into communities of densely connected nodes; where the connectivity
between nodes inside a particular community is large compared to the
connectivity between nodes belonging to different ones. This problem is known
as community detection, and has become very important in various fields of
science including chemistry, biology and social sciences. The problem of
community detection is a twofold problem that consists of determining the
number of communities and, at the same time, finding those communities. This
drastically increases the solution space for heuristics to work on, compared to
traditional graph partitioning problems. In many of the scientific domains in
which graphs are used, there is the need to have the ability to partition a
graph into communities with the ``highest quality'' possible since the presence
of even small isolated communities can become crucial to explain a particular
phenomenon. We have explored community detection using the power of quantum
annealers, and in particular the D-Wave 2X and 2000Q machines. It turns out
that the problem of detecting at most two communities naturally fits into the
architecture of a quantum annealer with almost no need of reformulation. This
paper addresses a systematic study of detecting two or more communities in a
network using a quantum annealer
Multiple Query Optimization on the D-Wave 2X Adiabatic Quantum Computer
The D-Wave adiabatic quantum annealer solves hard combinatorial optimization
problems leveraging quantum physics. The newest version features over 1000
qubits and was released in August 2015. We were given access to such a machine,
currently hosted at NASA Ames Research Center in California, to explore the
potential for hard optimization problems that arise in the context of
databases.
In this paper, we tackle the problem of multiple query optimization (MQO). We
show how an MQO problem instance can be transformed into a mathematical formula
that complies with the restrictive input format accepted by the quantum
annealer. This formula is translated into weights on and between qubits such
that the configuration minimizing the input formula can be found via a process
called adiabatic quantum annealing. We analyze the asymptotic growth rate of
the number of required qubits in the MQO problem dimensions as the number of
qubits is currently the main factor restricting applicability. We
experimentally compare the performance of the quantum annealer against other
MQO algorithms executed on a traditional computer. While the problem sizes that
can be treated are currently limited, we already find a class of problem
instances where the quantum annealer is three orders of magnitude faster than
other approaches
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Artificial Immune Systems - Models, algorithms and applications
Copyright © 2010 Academic Research Publishing Agency.This article has been made available through the Brunel Open Access Publishing Fund.Artificial Immune Systems (AIS) are computational paradigms that belong to the computational intelligence family and are inspired by the biological immune system. During the past decade, they have attracted a lot of interest from researchers aiming to develop immune-based models and techniques to solve complex computational or engineering problems. This work presents a survey of existing AIS models and algorithms with a focus on the last five years.This article is available through the Brunel Open Access Publishing Fun
Mapping constrained optimization problems to quantum annealing with application to fault diagnosis
Current quantum annealing (QA) hardware suffers from practical limitations
such as finite temperature, sparse connectivity, small qubit numbers, and
control error. We propose new algorithms for mapping boolean constraint
satisfaction problems (CSPs) onto QA hardware mitigating these limitations. In
particular we develop a new embedding algorithm for mapping a CSP onto a
hardware Ising model with a fixed sparse set of interactions, and propose two
new decomposition algorithms for solving problems too large to map directly
into hardware.
The mapping technique is locally-structured, as hardware compatible Ising
models are generated for each problem constraint, and variables appearing in
different constraints are chained together using ferromagnetic couplings. In
contrast, global embedding techniques generate a hardware independent Ising
model for all the constraints, and then use a minor-embedding algorithm to
generate a hardware compatible Ising model. We give an example of a class of
CSPs for which the scaling performance of D-Wave's QA hardware using the local
mapping technique is significantly better than global embedding.
We validate the approach by applying D-Wave's hardware to circuit-based
fault-diagnosis. For circuits that embed directly, we find that the hardware is
typically able to find all solutions from a min-fault diagnosis set of size N
using 1000N samples, using an annealing rate that is 25 times faster than a
leading SAT-based sampling method. Further, we apply decomposition algorithms
to find min-cardinality faults for circuits that are up to 5 times larger than
can be solved directly on current hardware.Comment: 22 pages, 4 figure
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