Component-wise Analysis of Automatically Designed Multiobjective Algorithms on Constrained Problems

The performance of multiobjective algorithms varies across problems, making it hard to develop new algorithms or apply existing ones to new problems. To simplify the development and application of new multiobjective algorithms, there has been an increasing interest in their automatic design from component parts. These automatically designed metaheuristics can outperform their human-developed counterparts. However, it is still uncertain what are the most influential components leading to their performance improvement. This study introduces a new methodology to investigate the effects of the final configuration of an automatically designed algorithm. We apply this methodology to a well-performing Multiobjective Evolutionary Algorithm Based on Decomposition (MOEA/D) designed by the irace package on nine constrained problems. We then contrast the impact of the algorithm components in terms of their Search Trajectory Networks (STNs), the diversity of the population, and the hypervolume. Our results indicate that the most influential components were the restart and update strategies, with higher increments in performance and more distinct metric values. Also, their relative influence depends on the problem difficulty: not using the restart strategy was more influential in problems where MOEA/D performs better; while the update strategy was more influential in problems where MOEA/D performs the worst

The MOEADr Package – A Component-Based Framework for Multiobjective Evolutionary Algorithms Based on Decomposition

Multiobjective Evolutionary Algorithms based on Decomposition (MOEA/D) represent a widely used class of population-based metaheuristics for the solution of multicriteria optimization problems. We introduce the MOEADr package, which offers many of these variants as instantiations of a component-oriented framework. This approach contributes for easier reproducibility of existing MOEA/D variants from the literature, as well as for faster development and testing of new composite algorithms. The package offers an standardized, modular implementation of MOEA/D based on this framework, which was designed aiming at providing researchers and practitioners with a standard way to discuss and express MOEA/D variants. In this paper we introduce the design principles behind the MOEADr package, as well as its current components. Three case studies are provided to illustrate the main aspects of the package

MOEA/D with Random Partial Update Strategy

Recent studies on resource allocation suggest that some subproblems are more important than others in the context of the MOEA/D, and that focusing on the most relevant ones can consistently improve the performance of that algorithm. These studies share the common characteristic of updating only a fraction of the population at any given iteration of the algorithm. In this work, we investigate a new, more straightforward partial update strategy, in which a random subset of solutions is selected at every iteration. The performance of the MOEA/D-DE using this new resource allocation approach is compared experimentally against that of the standard MOEA/D-DE and the MOEA/D-DE with relative improvement-based resource allocation. The results indicate that using MOEA/D with this new partial update strategy results in improved HV and IGD values, and a much higher proportion of non-dominated solutions, particularly as the number of updated solutions at every iteration is reduced

Sharks, Zombies and Volleyball: Lessons from the Evolutionary Computation Bestiary

The field of optimization metaheuristics has a long history of finding inspiration in natural systems. Starting from classic methods such as Genetic Algorithms and Ant Colony Optimization, more recent methods claim to be inspired by natural (and sometimes even supernatural) systems and phenomena - from birds and barnacles to reincarnation and zombies. Since 2014 we publish a humorous website, The Bestiary of Evolutionary Computation, to catalog these methods, witnessing an explosion of metaphor-heavy algorithms in the literature. While metaphors can be powerful inspiration tools, we argue that the emergence of hundreds of barely discernible algorithmic variants under different labels and nomenclatures has been counterproductive to the scientific progress of the field, as it neither improves our ability to understand and simulate biological systems, nor contributes generalizable knowledge or design principles for global optimization approaches. In this short paper we discuss some of the possible causes of this trend, its negative consequences to the field, as well as some efforts aimed at moving the area of metaheuristics towards a better balance between inspiration and scientific soundness

Optimized bi-dimensional data projection for clustering visualization

We propose a new method to project n-dimensional data onto two dimensions, for visualization purposes. Our goal is to produce a bi-dimensional representation that better separate existing clusters. Accordingly, to generate this projection we apply Differential Evolution as a meta-heuristic to optimize a divergence measure of the projected data. This divergence measure is based on the Cauchy–Schwartz divergence, extended for multiple classes. It accounts for the separability of the clusters in the projected space using the Renyi entropy and Information Theoretical Clustering analysis. We test the proposed method on two synthetic and five real world data sets, obtaining well separated projected clusters in two dimensions. These results were compared with results generated by PCA and a recent likelihood based visualization method