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This survey compiles ideas and recommendations from more than a dozen researchers with different backgrounds and from different institutes around the world. Promoting best practice in benchmarking is its main goal. The article discusses eight essential topics in benchmarking: clearly stated goals, well- specified problems, suitable algorithms, adequate performance measures, thoughtful analysis, effective and efficient designs, comprehensible presentations, and guaranteed reproducibility. The final goal is to provide well-accepted guidelines (rules) that might be useful for authors and reviewers. As benchmarking in optimization is an active and evolving field of research this manuscript is meant to co-evolve over time by means of periodic updates.
Many black-box optimization problems rely on simulations to evaluate the quality of candidate solutions. These evaluations can be computationally expensive and very time-consuming. We present and approach to mitigate this problem by taking into consideration two factors: The number of evaluations and the execution time. We aim to keep the number of evaluations low by using Bayesian optimization (BO) – known to be sample efficient– and to reduce wall-clock times by executing parallel evaluations. Four parallelization methods using BO as optimizer are compared against the inherently parallel CMA-ES. Each method is evaluated on all the 24 objective functions of the Black-Box-Optimization-Benchmarking test suite in their 20-dimensional versions. The results show that parallelized BO outperforms the state-of-the-art CMA-ES on most of the test functions, also on higher dimensions.
An important class of black-box optimization problems relies on using simulations to assess the quality of a given candidate solution. Solving such problems can be computationally expensive because each simulation is very time-consuming. We present an approach to mitigate this problem by distinguishing two factors of computational cost: the number of trials and the time needed to execute the trials. Our approach tries to keep down the number of trials by using Bayesian optimization (BO) –known to be sample efficient– and reducing wall-clock times by parallel execution of trials. We compare the performance of four parallelization methods and two model-free alternatives. Each method is evaluated on all 24 objective functions of the Black-Box-Optimization- Benchmarking (BBOB) test suite in their five, ten, and 20-dimensional versions. Additionally, their performance is investigated on six test cases in robot learning. The results show that parallelized BO outperforms the state-of-the-art CMA-ES on the BBOB test functions, especially for higher dimensions. On the robot learning tasks, the differences are less clear, but the data do support parallelized BO as the ‘best guess’, winning on some cases and never losing.
Sensor placement for contaminant detection in water distribution systems (WDS) has become a topic of great interest aiming to secure a population's water supply. Several approaches can be found in the literature with differences ranging from the objective selected to optimize to the methods implemented to solve the optimization problem. In this work we aim to give an overview of the current work in sensor placement with focus on contaminant detection for WDS. We present some of the objectives for which the sensor placement problem is defined along with common optimization algorithms and Toolkits available to help with algorithm testing and comparison.
Ziel des Forschungsprojektes "Mehrkriterielle CI-basierte Optimierungsverfahren für den industriellen Einsatz" (MCIOP) war die Verringerung von Schadstoffemissionen in Kohlekraftwerken. Der wissenschaftliche Fokus lag auf der Entwicklung von Methoden, die in der Lage sind, interpretierbare Modelle für die Schadstoffemissionen automatisch zu generieren. Hierzu wurden mehrkriterielle Optimierungsverfahren entwickelt und eingesetzt. Zur Zeit- und Kostenreduktion wurde die Optimierung durch Surrogat-Modelle erfolgen, die abgestuft mit aufwändigeren Simulationen zum Einsatz kamen („optimization via simulation“). Bei der Untersuchung von Staubabscheidern konnten durch eine mehrkriterielle Optimierung unterschiedliche Zielgrößen, wie z.B. Abscheidegrad und Druckverlust, gleichzeitig berücksichtigt werden.
Dieser Bericht beschreibt die im Projekt MCIOP im Zeitraum von August 2011 bis einschließlich Juni 2015 erzielten Ergebnisse.
This report presents a practical approach to stacked generalization in surrogate model based optimization. It exemplifies the integration of stacking methods into the surrogate model building process. First, a brief overview of the current state in surrogate model based opti- mization is presented. Stacked generalization is introduced as a promising ensemble surrogate modeling approach. Then two examples (the first is based on a real world application and the second on a set of artificial test functions) are presented. These examples clearly illustrate two properties of stacked generalization: (i) combining information from two poor performing models can result in a good performing model and (ii) even if the ensemble contains a good performing model, combining its information with information from poor performing models results in a relatively small performance decrease only.
When researchers and practitioners in the field of
computational intelligence are confronted with real-world
problems, the question arises which method is the best to
apply. Nowadays, there are several, well established test
suites and well known artificial benchmark functions
available.
However, relevance and applicability of these methods to
real-world problems remains an open question in many
situations. Furthermore, the generalizability of these
methods cannot be taken for granted.
This paper describes a data-driven approach for the
generation of test instances, which is based on
real-world data. The test instance generation uses
data-preprocessing, feature extraction, modeling, and
parameterization. We apply this methodology on a classical
design of experiment real-world project and generate test
instances for benchmarking, e.g. design methods, surrogate
techniques, and optimization algorithms. While most
available results of methods applied on real-world
problems lack availability of the data for comparison,
our future goal is to create a toolbox covering multiple
data sets of real-world projects to provide a test
function generator to the research community.
We propose to apply typed Genetic Programming (GP) to the problem of finding surrogate-model ensembles for global optimization on compute-intensive target functions. In a model ensemble, base-models such as linear models, random forest models, or Kriging models, as well as pre- and post-processing methods, are combined. In theory, an optimal ensemble will join the strengths of its comprising base-models while avoiding their weaknesses, offering higher prediction accuracy and robustness. This study defines a grammar of model ensemble expressions and searches the set for optimal ensembles via GP. We performed an extensive experimental study based on 10 different objective functions and 2 sets of base-models. We arrive at promising results, as on unseen test data, our ensembles perform not significantly worse than the best base-model.
Sequential Parameter Optimization is a model-based optimization methodology, which includes several techniques for handling uncertainty. Simple approaches such as sharp- ening and more sophisticated approaches such as optimal computing budget allocation are available. For many real world engineering problems, the objective function can be evaluated at different levels of fidelity. For instance, a CFD simulation might provide a very time consuming but accurate way to estimate the quality of a solution.The same solution could be evaluated based on simplified mathematical equations, leading to a cheaper but less accurate estimate. Combining these different levels of fidelity in a model-based optimization process is referred to as multi-fidelity optimization. This chapter describes uncertainty-handling techniques for meta-model based search heuristics in combination with multi-fidelity optimization. Co-Kriging is one power- ful method to correlate multiple sets of data from different levels of fidelity. For the first time, Sequential Parameter Optimization with co-Kriging is applied to noisy test functions. This study will introduce these techniques and discuss how they can be applied to real-world examples.