A new evolutionary search strategy for global optimization of high-dimensional problems

Global optimization of high-dimensional problems in practical applications remains a major challenge to the research community of evolutionary computation. The weakness of randomization-based evolutionary algorithms in searching high-dimensional spaces is demonstrated in this paper. A new strategy, SP-UCI is developed to treat complexity caused by high dimensionalities. This strategy features a slope-based searching kernel and a scheme of maintaining the particle population's capability of searching over the full search space. Examinations of this strategy on a suite of sophisticated composition benchmark functions demonstrate that SP-UCI surpasses two popular algorithms, particle swarm optimizer (PSO) and differential evolution (DE), on high-dimensional problems. Experimental results also corroborate the argument that, in high-dimensional optimization, only problems with well-formative fitness landscapes are solvable, and slope-based schemes are preferable to randomization-based ones. © 2011 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved

A Particle Swarm Optimization inspired tracker applied to visual tracking

International audienceVisual tracking is dynamic optimization where time and object state simultaneously influence the problem. In this paper, we intend to show that we built a tracker from an evolutionary optimization approach, the PSO (Particle Swarm optimization) algorithm. We demonstrated that an extension of the original algorithm where system dynamics is explicitly taken into consideration, it can perform an efficient tracking. This tracker is also shown to outperform SIR (Sampling Importance Resampling) algorithm with random walk and constant velocity model, as well as a previously PSO inspired tracker, SPSO (Sequential Particle Swarm Optimization). Experiments were performed both on simulated data and real visual RGB-D information. Our PSO inspired tracker can be a very effective and robust alternative for visual tracking

Prediction of progression in idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis using CT scans atbaseline: A quantum particle swarm optimization - Random forest approach

Idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF) is a fatal lung disease characterized by an unpredictable progressive declinein lung function. Natural history of IPF is unknown and the prediction of disease progression at the time ofdiagnosis is notoriously difficult. High resolution computed tomography (HRCT) has been used for the diagnosisof IPF, but not generally for monitoring purpose. The objective of this work is to develop a novel predictivemodel for the radiological progression pattern at voxel-wise level using only baseline HRCT scans. Mainly, thereare two challenges: (a) obtaining a data set of features for region of interest (ROI) on baseline HRCT scans andtheir follow-up status; and (b) simultaneously selecting important features from high-dimensional space, andoptimizing the prediction performance. We resolved the first challenge by implementing a study design andhaving an expert radiologist contour ROIs at baseline scans, depending on its progression status in follow-upvisits. For the second challenge, we integrated the feature selection with prediction by developing an algorithmusing a wrapper method that combines quantum particle swarm optimization to select a small number of featureswith random forest to classify early patterns of progression. We applied our proposed algorithm to analyzeanonymized HRCT images from 50 IPF subjects from a multi-center clinical trial. We showed that it yields aparsimonious model with 81.8% sensitivity, 82.2% specificity and an overall accuracy rate of 82.1% at the ROIlevel. These results are superior to other popular feature selections and classification methods, in that ourmethod produces higher accuracy in prediction of progression and more balanced sensitivity and specificity witha smaller number of selected features. Our work is the first approach to show that it is possible to use onlybaseline HRCT scans to predict progressive ROIs at 6 months to 1year follow-ups using artificial intelligence

Uncertainty And Evolutionary Optimization: A Novel Approach

Evolutionary algorithms (EA) have been widely accepted as efficient solvers for complex real world optimization problems, including engineering optimization. However, real world optimization problems often involve uncertain environment including noisy and/or dynamic environments, which pose major challenges to EA-based optimization. The presence of noise interferes with the evaluation and the selection process of EA, and thus adversely affects its performance. In addition, as presence of noise poses challenges to the evaluation of the fitness function, it may need to be estimated instead of being evaluated. Several existing approaches attempt to address this problem, such as introduction of diversity (hyper mutation, random immigrants, special operators) or incorporation of memory of the past (diploidy, case based memory). However, these approaches fail to adequately address the problem. In this paper we propose a Distributed Population Switching Evolutionary Algorithm (DPSEA) method that addresses optimization of functions with noisy fitness using a distributed population switching architecture, to simulate a distributed self-adaptive memory of the solution space. Local regression is used in the pseudo-populations to estimate the fitness. Successful applications to benchmark test problems ascertain the proposed method's superior performance in terms of both robustness and accuracy.Comment: In Proceedings of the The 9th IEEE Conference on Industrial Electronics and Applications (ICIEA 2014), IEEE Press, pp. 988-983, 201

Accurate angle-of-arrival measurement using particle swarm optimization

As one of the major methods for location positioning, angle-of-arrival (AOA) estimation is a significant technology in radar, sonar, radio astronomy, and mobile communications. AOA measurements can be exploited to locate mobile units, enhance communication efficiency and network capacity, and support location-aided routing, dynamic network management, and many location-based services. In this paper, we propose an algorithm for AOA estimation in colored noise fields and harsh application scenarios. By modeling the unknown noise covariance as a linear combination of known weighting matrices, a maximum likelihood (ML) criterion is established, and a particle swarm optimization (PSO) paradigm is designed to optimize the cost function. Simulation results demonstrate that the paired estimator PSO-ML significantly outperforms other popular techniques and produces superior AOA estimates

An Oversampling Mechanism for Multimajority Datasets using SMOTE and Darwinian Particle Swarm Optimisation

Data skewness continues to be one of the leading factors which adversely impacts the machine learning algorithms performance. An approach to reduce this negative effect of the data variance is to pre-process the former dataset with data level resampling strategies. Resampling strategies have been seen in two forms, oversampling and undersampling. An oversampling strategy is proposed in this article for tackling multiclass imbalanced datasets. This proposed approach optimises the state-of-the-art oversampling technique SMOTE with the Darwinian Particle Swarm Optimization technique. This proposed method DOSMOTE generates synthetic optimised samples for balancing the datasets. This strategy will be more effective on multimajority datasets.  An experimental study is performed on peculiar multimajority datasets to measure the effectiveness of the proposed approach. As a result, the proposed method produces promising results when compared to the conventional oversampling strategies