A Guided Mutation Operator for Dynamic Diversity Enhancement in Evolutionary Strategies

2014 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 20-39
Author(s):  
José L. Guerrero ◽  
Antonio Berlanga ◽  
José M. Molina

Diversity in evolutionary algorithms is a critical issue related to the performance obtained during the search process and strongly linked to convergence issues. The lack of the required diversity has been traditionally linked to problematic situations such as early stopping in the presence of local optima (usually faced when the number of individuals in the population is insufficient to deal with the search space). Current proposal introduces a guided mutation operator to cope with these diversity issues, introducing tracking mechanisms of the search space in order to feed the required information to this mutation operator. The objective of the proposed mutation operator is to guarantee a certain degree of coverage over the search space before the algorithm is stopped, attempting to prevent early convergence, which may be introduced by the lack of population diversity. A dynamic mechanism is included in order to determine, in execution time, the degree of application of the technique, adapting the number of cycles when the technique is applied. The results have been tested over a dataset of ten standard single objective functions with different characteristics regarding dimensionality, presence of multiple local optima, search space range and three different dimensionality values, 30D, 300D and 1000D. Thirty different runs have been performed in order to cover the effect of the introduced operator and the statistical relevance of the measured results

Author(s):  
A. N. M. Bazlur Rashid ◽  
Tonmoy Choudhury

Real-word large-scale optimisation problems often result in local optima due to their large search space and complex objective function. Hence, traditional evolutionary algorithms (EAs) are not suitable for these problems. Distributed EA, such as a cooperative co-evolutionary algorithm (CCEA), can solve these problems efficiently. It can decompose a large-scale problem into smaller sub-problems and evolve them independently. Further, the CCEA population diversity avoids local optima. Besides, MapReduce, an open-source platform, provides a ready-to-use distributed, scalable, and fault-tolerant infrastructure to parallelise the developed algorithm using the map and reduce features. The CCEA can be distributed and executed in parallel using the MapReduce model to solve large-scale optimisations in less computing time. The effectiveness of CCEA, together with the MapReduce, has been proven in the literature for large-scale optimisations. This article presents the cooperative co-evolution, MapReduce model, and associated techniques suitable for large-scale optimisation problems.


Author(s):  
Daniel Manrique ◽  
Juan Ríos ◽  
Alfonso Rodríguez-Patón

Evolutionary computation (EC) is the study of computational systems that borrow ideas from and are inspired by natural evolution and adaptation (Yao & Xu, 2006, pp. 1-18). EC covers a number of techniques based on evolutionary processes and natural selection: evolutionary strategies, genetic algorithms and genetic programming (Keedwell & Narayanan, 2005). Evolutionary strategies are an approach for efficiently solving certain continuous problems, yielding good results for some parametric problems in real domains. Compared with genetic algorithms, evolutionary strategies run more exploratory searches and are a good option when applied to relatively unknown parametric problems. Genetic algorithms emulate the evolutionary process that takes place in nature. Individuals compete for survival by adapting as best they can to the environmental conditions. Crossovers between individuals, mutations and deaths are all part of this process of adaptation. By substituting the natural environment for the problem to be solved, we get a computationally cheap method that is capable of dealing with any problem, provided we know how to determine individuals’ fitness (Manrique, 2001). Genetic programming is an extension of genetic algorithms (Couchet, Manrique, Ríos & Rodríguez- Patón, 2006). Its aim is to build computer programs that are not expressly designed and programmed by a human being. It can be said to be an optimization technique whose search space is composed of all possible computer programs for solving a particular problem. Genetic programming’s key advantage over genetic algorithms is that it can handle individuals (computer programs) of different lengths. Grammar-guided genetic programming (GGGP) is an extension of traditional GP systems (Whigham, 1995, pp. 33-41). The difference lies in the fact that they employ context-free grammars (CFG) that generate all the possible solutions to a given problem as sentences, establishing this way the formal definition of the syntactic problem constraints, and use the derivation trees for each sentence to encode these solutions (Dounias, Tsakonas, Jantzen, Axer, Bjerregard & von Keyserlingk, D. 2002, pp. 494-500). The use of this type of syntactic formalisms helps to solve the so-called closure problem (Whigham, 1996). To achieve closure valid individuals (points that belong to the search space) should always be generated. As the generation of invalid individuals slows down convergence speed a great deal, solving this problem will very much improve the GP search capability. The basic operator directly affecting the closure problem is crossover: crossing two (or any) valid individuals should generate a valid offspring. Similarly, this is the operator that has the biggest impact on the process of convergence towards the optimum solution. Therefore, this article reviews the most important crossover operators employed in GP and GGGP, highlighting the weaknesses existing nowadays in this area of research. We also propose a GGGP system. This system incorporates the original idea of employing ambiguous CFG to overcome these weaknesses, thereby increasing convergence speed and reducing the likelihood of trapping in local optima. Comparative results are shown to empirically corroborate our claims.


Author(s):  
Prachi Agrawal ◽  
Talari Ganesh ◽  
Ali Wagdy Mohamed

AbstractThis article proposes a novel binary version of recently developed Gaining Sharing knowledge-based optimization algorithm (GSK) to solve binary optimization problems. GSK algorithm is based on the concept of how humans acquire and share knowledge during their life span. A binary version of GSK named novel binary Gaining Sharing knowledge-based optimization algorithm (NBGSK) depends on mainly two binary stages: binary junior gaining sharing stage and binary senior gaining sharing stage with knowledge factor 1. These two stages enable NBGSK for exploring and exploitation of the search space efficiently and effectively to solve problems in binary space. Moreover, to enhance the performance of NBGSK and prevent the solutions from trapping into local optima, NBGSK with population size reduction (PR-NBGSK) is introduced. It decreases the population size gradually with a linear function. The proposed NBGSK and PR-NBGSK applied to set of knapsack instances with small and large dimensions, which shows that NBGSK and PR-NBGSK are more efficient and effective in terms of convergence, robustness, and accuracy.


2021 ◽  
Vol 16 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ruiheng Li ◽  
Qiong Zhuang ◽  
Nian Yu ◽  
Ruiyou Li ◽  
Huaiqing Zhang

Background: Recently, particle swarm optimization (PSO) has been increasingly used in geophysics due to its simple operation and fast convergence. Objective: However, PSO lacks population diversity and may fall to local optima. Hence, an improved hybrid particle swarm optimizer with sine-cosine acceleration coefficients (IH-PSO-SCAC) is proposed and successfully applied to test functions and in transient electromagnetic (TEM) nonlinear inversion. Method: A reverse learning strategy is applied to optimize population initialization. The sine-cosine acceleration coefficients are utilized for global convergence. Sine mapping is adopted to enhance population diversity during the search process. In addition, the mutation method is used to reduce the probability of premature convergence. Results: The application of IH-PSO-SCAC in the test functions and several simple layered models are demonstrated with satisfactory results in terms of data fit. Two inversions have been carried out to test our algorithm. The first model contains an underground low-resistivity anomaly body and the second model utilized measured data from a profile of the Xishan landslide in Sichuan Province. In both cases, resistivity profiles are obtained, and the inverse problem is solved for verification. Conclusion: The results show that the IH-PSO-SCAC algorithm is practical, can be effectively applied in TEM inversion and is superior to other representative algorithms in terms of stability and accuracy.


2022 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 473-512
Author(s):  
Rong Zheng ◽  
◽  
Heming Jia ◽  
Laith Abualigah ◽  
Qingxin Liu ◽  
...  

<abstract> <p>Arithmetic optimization algorithm (AOA) is a newly proposed meta-heuristic method which is inspired by the arithmetic operators in mathematics. However, the AOA has the weaknesses of insufficient exploration capability and is likely to fall into local optima. To improve the searching quality of original AOA, this paper presents an improved AOA (IAOA) integrated with proposed forced switching mechanism (FSM). The enhanced algorithm uses the random math optimizer probability (<italic>RMOP</italic>) to increase the population diversity for better global search. And then the forced switching mechanism is introduced into the AOA to help the search agents jump out of the local optima. When the search agents cannot find better positions within a certain number of iterations, the proposed FSM will make them conduct the exploratory behavior. Thus the cases of being trapped into local optima can be avoided effectively. The proposed IAOA is extensively tested by twenty-three classical benchmark functions and ten CEC2020 test functions and compared with the AOA and other well-known optimization algorithms. The experimental results show that the proposed algorithm is superior to other comparative algorithms on most of the test functions. Furthermore, the test results of two training problems of multi-layer perceptron (MLP) and three classical engineering design problems also indicate that the proposed IAOA is highly effective when dealing with real-world problems.</p> </abstract>


Author(s):  
Vijay Kumar ◽  
Dinesh Kumar

The clustering techniques suffer from cluster centers initialization and local optima problems. In this chapter, the new metaheuristic algorithm, Sine Cosine Algorithm (SCA), is used as a search method to solve these problems. The SCA explores the search space of given dataset to find out the near-optimal cluster centers. The center based encoding scheme is used to evolve the cluster centers. The proposed SCA-based clustering technique is evaluated on four real-life datasets. The performance of SCA-based clustering is compared with recently developed clustering techniques. The experimental results reveal that SCA-based clustering gives better values in terms of cluster quality measures.


Author(s):  
Jiarui Zhou ◽  
Junshan Yang ◽  
Ling Lin ◽  
Zexuan Zhu ◽  
Zhen Ji

Particle swarm optimization (PSO) is a swarm intelligence algorithm well known for its simplicity and high efficiency on various problems. Conventional PSO suffers from premature convergence due to the rapid convergence speed and lack of population diversity. It is easy to get trapped in local optima. For this reason, improvements are made to detect stagnation during the optimization and reactivate the swarm to search towards the global optimum. This chapter imposes the reflecting bound-handling scheme and von Neumann topology on PSO to increase the population diversity. A novel crown jewel defense (CJD) strategy is introduced to restart the swarm when it is trapped in a local optimum region. The resultant algorithm named LCJDPSO-rfl is tested on a group of unimodal and multimodal benchmark functions with rotation and shifting. Experimental results suggest that the LCJDPSO-rfl outperforms state-of-the-art PSO variants on most of the functions.


2022 ◽  
pp. 166-201
Author(s):  
Asha Gowda Karegowda ◽  
Devika G.

Artificial neural networks (ANN) are often more suitable for classification problems. Even then, training of ANN is a surviving challenge task for large and high dimensional natured search space problems. These hitches are more for applications that involves process of fine tuning of ANN control parameters: weights and bias. There is no single search and optimization method that suits the weights and bias of ANN for all the problems. The traditional heuristic approach fails because of their poorer convergence speed and chances of ending up with local optima. In this connection, the meta-heuristic algorithms prove to provide consistent solution for optimizing ANN training parameters. This chapter will provide critics on both heuristics and meta-heuristic existing literature for training neural networks algorithms, applicability, and reliability on parameter optimization. In addition, the real-time applications of ANN will be presented. Finally, future directions to be explored in the field of ANN are presented which will of potential interest for upcoming researchers.


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