A Mating Selection Based on Modified Strengthened Dominance Relation for NSGA-III

In multi/many-objective evolutionary algorithms (MOEAs), to alleviate the degraded convergence pressure of Pareto dominance with the increase in the number of objectives, numerous modified dominance relationships were proposed. Recently, the strengthened dominance relation (SDR) has been proposed, where the dominance area of a solution is determined by convergence degree and niche size (θ¯). Later, in controlled SDR (CSDR), θ¯ and an additional parameter (k) associated with the convergence degree are dynamically adjusted depending on the iteration count. Depending on the problem characteristics and the distribution of the current population, different situations require different values of k, rendering the linear reduction of k based on the generation count ineffective. This is because a particular value of k is expected to bias the dominance relationship towards a particular region on the Pareto front (PF). In addition, due to the same reason, using SDR or CSDR in the environmental selection cannot preserve the diversity of solutions required to cover the entire PF. Therefore, we propose an MOEA, referred to as NSGA-III*, where (1) a modified SDR (MSDR)-based mating selection with an adaptive ensemble of parameter k would prioritize parents from specific sections of the PF depending on k, and (2) the traditional weight vector and non-dominated sorting-based environmental selection of NSGA-III would protect the solutions corresponding to the entire PF. The performance of NSGA-III* is favourably compared with state-of-the-art MOEAs on DTLZ and WFG test suites with up to 10 objectives.

Attribute significance based on inclusion degree for incomplete information systems and their applications to MADM problems

Attribute significance is very important in multiple-attribute decision-making (MADM) problems. In a MADM problem, the significance of attributes is often different. In order to overcome the shortcoming that attribute significance is usually given artificially. The purpose of this paper is to give attribute significance computation formulas based on inclusion degree. We note that in the real-world application, there is a lot of incomplete information due to the error of data measurement, the limitation of data understanding and data acquisition, etc. Firstly, we give a general description and the definition of incomplete information systems. We then establish the tolerance relation for incomplete linguistic information system, with the tolerance classes and inclusion degree, significance of attribute is proposed and the corresponding computation formula is obtained. Subsequently, for incomplete fuzzy information system and incomplete interval-valued fuzzy information system, the dominance relation and interval dominance relation is established, respectively. And the dominance class and interval dominance class of an element are got as well. With the help of inclusion degree, the computation formulas of attribute significance for incomplete fuzzy information system and incomplete interval-valued fuzzy information system are also obtained. At the same time, results show that the reduction of attribute set can be obtained by computing the significance of attributes in these incomplete information systems. Finally, as the applications of attribute significance, the attribute significance is viewed as attribute weights to solve MADM problems and the corresponding TOPSIS methods for three incomplete information systems are proposed. The numerical examples are also employed to illustrate the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed approaches.

Extension of Monotonic Functions and Representation of Preferences

Consider a dominance relation (a preorder) ≿ on a topological space X, such as the greater than or equal to relation on a function space or a stochastic dominance relation on a space of probability measures. Given a compact set K ⊆ X, we study when a continuous real function on K that is strictly monotonic with respect to ≿ can be extended to X without violating the continuity and monotonicity conditions. We show that such extensions exist for translation invariant dominance relations on a large class of topological vector spaces. Translation invariance or a vector structure are no longer needed when X is locally compact and second countable. In decision theoretic exercises, our extension theorems help construct monotonic utility functions on the universal space X starting from compact subsets. To illustrate, we prove several representation theorems for revealed or exogenously given preferences that are monotonic with respect to a dominance relation.