Multiobjective Optimization Differential Evolution Enhanced with Principle Component Analysis for Constrained Optimization

Multiobjective optimization evolutionary algorithms have been successfully applied to solving constrained optimization problems. This paper proposes a new multiobjective optimization differential evolution algorithm for constrained optimization. Through a study of fitness landscapes using principle component analysis, we discover a statistic method of identifying the valley direction in a valley landscape. Based on this discovery, a new search operator called PCA-projection is constructed which projects an individual to a position along the valley direction. Then multiobjective optimization differential evolution using this projection operator is designed for constrained optimization. A comparative experiment has been implemented between the proposed algorithm and a state-of-the-art multiobjective differential evolution algorithm on a standard set of 24 benchmarks. Experimental results show that the new algorithm makes a significant improvement in terms of solution accuracy. The proposed algorithm is also competitive with ten evolutionary algorithms participated in an IEEE CEC 2006 competition and is ranked third in terms of the final rank.

New Methods of Studying Valley Fitness Landscapes

The word "valley" is a popular term used in intuitively describing fitness landscapes. What is a valley on a fitness landscape? How to identify the direction and location of a valley if it exists? However, such questions are seldom rigorously studied in evolutionary optimization especially when the search space is a high dimensional continuous space. This paper presents two methods of studying valleys on a fitness landscape. The first method is based on the topological homeomorphism. It establishes a rigorous definition of a valley. A valley is regarded as a one-dimensional manifold. The second method takes a different viewpoint from statistics. It provides an algorithm of identifying the valley direction and location using principle component analysis.

An Analytic Expression of Relative Approximation Error for a Class of Evolutionary Algorithms

An important question in evolutionary computation is how good solutions evolutionary algorithms can produce. This paper aims to provide an analytic analysis of solution quality in terms of the relative approximation error, which is defined by the error between 1 and the approximation ratio of the solution found by an evolutionary algorithm. Since evolutionary algorithms are iterative methods, the relative approximation error is a function of generations. With the help of matrix analysis, it is possible to obtain an exact expression of such a function. In this paper, an analytic expression for calculating the relative approximation error is presented for a class of evolutionary algorithms, that is, (1+1) strictly elitist evolution algorithms. Furthermore, analytic expressions of the fitness value and the average convergence rate in each generation are also derived for this class of evolutionary algorithms. The approach is promising, and it can be extended to non-elitist or population-based algorithms too.

Average Drift Analysis and Population Scalability

This paper aims to study how the population size affects the computation time of evolutionary algorithms in a rigorous way. The computation time of an evolutionary algorithm can be measured by either the expected number of generations (hitting time) or the expected number of fitness evaluations (running time) to find an optimal solution. Population scalability is the ratio of the expected hitting time between a benchmark algorithm and an algorithm using a larger population size. Average drift analysis is presented for comparing the expected hitting time of two algorithms and estimating lower and upper bounds on population scalability. Several intuitive beliefs are rigorously analysed. It is prove that (1) using a population sometimes increases rather than decreases the expected hitting time; (2) using a population cannot shorten the expected running time of any elitist evolutionary algorithm on unimodal functions in terms of the time-fitness landscape, but this is not true in terms of the distance-based fitness landscape; (3) using a population cannot always reduce the expected running time on fully-deceptive functions, which depends on the benchmark algorithm using elitist selection or random selection.

Multi-objective Differential Evolution with Helper Functions for Constrained Optimization

Solving constrained optimization problems by multi-objective evolutionary algorithms has scored tremendous achievements in the last decade. Standard multi-objective schemes usually aim at minimizing the objective function and also the degree of constraint violation simultaneously. This paper proposes a new multi-objective method for solving constrained optimization problems. The new method keeps two standard objectives: the original objective function and the sum of degrees of constraint violation. But besides them, four more objectives are added. One is based on the feasible rule. The other three come from the penalty functions. This paper conducts an initial experimental study on thirteen benchmark functions. A simplified version of CMODE is applied to solving multi-objective optimization problems. Our initial experimental results confirm our expectation that adding more helper functions could be useful. The performance of SMODE with more helper functions (four or six) is better than that with only two helper functions.

Average Convergence Rate of Evolutionary Algorithms

In evolutionary optimization, it is important to understand how fast evolutionary algorithms converge to the optimum per generation, or their convergence rate. This paper proposes a new measure of the convergence rate, called average convergence rate. It is a normalised geometric mean of the reduction ratio of the fitness difference per generation. The calculation of the average convergence rate is very simple and it is applicable for most evolutionary algorithms on both continuous and discrete optimization. A theoretical study of the average convergence rate is conducted for discrete optimization. Lower bounds on the average convergence rate are derived. The limit of the average convergence rate is analysed and then the asymptotic average convergence rate is proposed.

Adaptive Stochastic Gradient Descent on the Grassmannian for Robust Low-Rank Subspace Recovery and Clustering

In this paper, we present GASG21 (Grassmannian Adaptive Stochastic Gradient for $L_{2,1}$ norm minimization), an adaptive stochastic gradient algorithm to robustly recover the low-rank subspace from a large matrix. In the presence of column outliers, we reformulate the batch mode matrix $L_{2,1}$ norm minimization with rank constraint problem as a stochastic optimization approach constrained on Grassmann manifold. For each observed data vector, the low-rank subspace $\mathcal{S}$ is updated by taking a gradient step along the geodesic of Grassmannian. In order to accelerate the convergence rate of the stochastic gradient method, we choose to adaptively tune the constant step-size by leveraging the consecutive gradients. Furthermore, we demonstrate that with proper initialization, the K-subspaces extension, K-GASG21, can robustly cluster a large number of corrupted data vectors into a union of subspaces. Numerical experiments on synthetic and real data demonstrate the efficiency and accuracy of the proposed algorithms even with heavy column outliers corruption.

Analysis of Solution Quality of a Multiobjective Optimization-based Evolutionary Algorithm for Knapsack Problem

Multi-objective optimisation is regarded as one of the most promising ways for dealing with constrained optimisation problems in evolutionary optimisation. This paper presents a theoretical investigation of a multi-objective optimisation evolutionary algorithm for solving the 0-1 knapsack problem. Two initialisation methods are considered in the algorithm: local search initialisation and greedy search initialisation. Then the solution quality of the algorithm is analysed in terms of the approximation ratio.

On the Easiest and Hardest Fitness Functions

The hardness of fitness functions is an important research topic in the field of evolutionary computation. In theory, the study can help understanding the ability of evolutionary algorithms. In practice, the study may provide a guideline to the design of benchmarks. The aim of this paper is to answer the following research questions: Given a fitness function class, which functions are the easiest with respect to an evolutionary algorithm? Which are the hardest? How are these functions constructed? The paper provides theoretical answers to these questions. The easiest and hardest fitness functions are constructed for an elitist (1+1) evolutionary algorithm to maximise a class of fitness functions with the same optima. It is demonstrated that the unimodal functions are the easiest and deceptive functions are the hardest in terms of the time-fitness landscape. The paper also reveals that the easiest fitness function to one algorithm may become the hardest to another algorithm, and vice versa.

Performance Analysis on Evolutionary Algorithms for the Minimum Label Spanning Tree Problem

Some experimental investigations have shown that evolutionary algorithms (EAs) are efficient for the minimum label spanning tree (MLST) problem. However, we know little about that in theory. As one step towards this issue, we theoretically analyze the performances of the (1+1) EA, a simple version of EAs, and a multi-objective evolutionary algorithm called GSEMO on the MLST problem. We reveal that for the MLST$_{b}$ problem the (1+1) EA and GSEMO achieve a $\frac{b+1}{2}$-approximation ratio in expected polynomial times of $n$ the number of nodes and $k$ the number of labels. We also show that GSEMO achieves a $(2ln(n))$-approximation ratio for the MLST problem in expected polynomial time of $n$ and $k$. At the same time, we show that the (1+1) EA and GSEMO outperform local search algorithms on three instances of the MLST problem. We also construct an instance on which GSEMO outperforms the (1+1) EA.