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Analysis of evolutionary algorithms using multi-objective parameter tuning

Published:12 July 2014Publication History

ABSTRACT

Evolutionary Algorithms (EAs) and other metaheuristics are greatly affected by the choice of their parameters, not only as regards the precision of the solutions found, but also for repeatability, robustness, speed of convergence, and other properties. Most of these performance criteria are often conflicting with one another. In our work, we see the problem of EAs' parameter selection and tuning as a multi-objective optimization problem, in which the criteria to be optimized are precision and speed of convergence. We propose EMOPaT (Evolutionary Multi-Objective Parameter Tuning), a method that uses a well-known multi-objective optimization algorithm (NSGA-II) to find a front of non-dominated parameter sets which produce good results according to these two metrics.

By doing so, we can provide three kinds of results: (i) a method that is able to adapt parameters to a single function, (ii) a comparison between Differential Evolution (DE) and Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) that takes into consideration both precision and speed, and (iii) an insight into how parameters of DE and PSO affect the performance of these EAs on different benchmark functions.

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      cover image ACM Conferences
      GECCO '14: Proceedings of the 2014 Annual Conference on Genetic and Evolutionary Computation
      July 2014
      1478 pages
      ISBN:9781450326629
      DOI:10.1145/2576768

      Copyright © 2014 ACM

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      Publication History

      • Published: 12 July 2014

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      GECCO '14 Paper Acceptance Rate180of544submissions,33%Overall Acceptance Rate1,669of4,410submissions,38%

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