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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.
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.