Optimization by Estimation of Distribution with DEUM Framework Based on Markov Random Fields

This paper presents a Markov random field (MRF) approach to estimating and sampling the probability distribution in populations of solutions.The approach is used to define a class of algorithms under the general heading distribution estimation using Markov random fields (DEUM).DEUM is a subclass of estimation of distribution algorithms (EDAs) where interaction between solution variables is represented as an undirected graph and the joint probability of a solution is factorized as a Gibbs distribution derived from the structure of the graph.The focus of this paper will be on describing the three main characteristics of DEUM framework,which distinguishes it from the traditional EDA.They are:1) use of MRF models,2) fitness modeling approach to estimating the parameter of the model and 3) Monte Carlo approach to sampling from the model.     

Orthogonal Methods Based Ant Colony Search for Solving Continuous Optimization Problems

Research into ant colony algorithms for solving continuous optimization problems forms one of the most significant and promising areas in swarm computation. Although traditional ant algorithms are designed for combinatorial optimization, they have shown great potential in solving a wide range of optimization problems, including continuous optimization. Aimed at solving continuous problems effectively, this paper develops a novel ant algorithm termed ＂continuous orthogonal ant colony＂ （COAC）, whose pheromone deposit mechanisms would enable ants to search for solutions collaboratively and effectively. By using the orthogonal design method, ants in the feasible domain can explore their chosen regions rapidly and efficiently. By implementing an ＂adaptive regional radius＂ method, the proposed algorithm can reduce the probability of being trapped in local optima and therefore enhance the global search capability and accuracy. An elitist strategy is also employed to reserve the most valuable points. The performance of the COAC is compared with two other ant algorithms for continuous optimization -API and CACO by testing seventeen functions in the continuous domain. The results demonstrate that the proposed COAC algorithm outperforms the others.     

Exploiting Bivariate Dependencies to Speedup Structure Learning in Bayesian Optimization Algorithm

Bayesian optimization algorithm (BOA) is one of the successful and widely used estimation of distribution algorithms (EDAs) which have been employed to solve different optimization problems. In EDAs, a model is learned from the selected population that encodes interactions among problem variables. New individuals are generated by sampling the model and incorporated into the population. Different probabilistic models have been used in EDAs to learn interactions. Bayesian network (BN) is a well-known graphical model which is used in BOA. Learning a proper model in EDAs and particularly in BOA is distinguished as a computationally expensive task. Different methods have been proposed in the literature to improve the complexity of model building in EDAs. This paper employs bivariate dependencies to learn accurate BNs in BOA efficiently. The proposed approach extracts the bivariate dependencies using an appropriate pairwise interaction-detection metric. Due to the static structure of the underlying problems, these dependencies are used in each generation of BOA to learn an accurate network. By using this approach, the computational cost of model building is reduced dramatically. Various optimization problems are selected to be solved by the algorithm. The experimental results show that the proposed approach successfully finds the optimum in problems with different types of interactions efficiently. Significant speedups are observed in the model building procedure as well.     

可修备件需求量的通用拟生灭过程模型

This paper aims at two problems which exist in most of repairable spare part demand models at present: the exponential distribution as the basic assumption and one typical distribution corresponding to a model. A general repairable spare part demand model built on quasi birth-and- death process is developed. This model assumes that both the operational time of the unit and the maintenance time of the unit follow the continuous time phase type distributions. The first passage time distribution to be out of spares, the first mean time to be out of spares, and an algorithm to get the minimal amount of spares under certain restrictions are obtained. At the end of this paper, a numerical example is given.     

A Hybrid Immigrants Scheme for Genetic Algorithms in Dynamic Environments

Dynamic optimization problems are a kind of optimization problems that involve changes over time.They pose a serious challenge to traditional optimization methods as well as conventional genetic algorithms since the goal is no longer to search for the optimal solution(s) of a fixed problem but to track the moving optimum over time.Dynamic optimization problems have attracted a growing interest from the genetic algorithm community in recent years.Several approaches have been developed to enhance the performance of genetic algorithms in dynamic environments.One approach is to maintain the diversity of the population via random immigrants.This paper proposes a hybrid immigrants scheme that combines the concepts of elitism,dualism and random immigrants for genetic algorithms to address dynamic optimization problems.In this hybrid scheme,the best individual,i.e.,the elite,from the previous generation and its dual individual are retrieved as the bases to create immigrants via traditional mutation scheme.These elitism-based and dualism-based immigrants together with some random immigrants are substituted into the current population,replacing the worst individuals in the population.These three kinds of immigrants aim to address environmental changes of slight,medium and significant degrees respectively and hence efficiently adapt genetic algorithms to dynamic environments that are subject to different severities of changes.Based on a series of systematically constructed dynamic test problems,experiments are carried out to investigate the performance of genetic algorithms with the hybrid immigrants scheme and traditional random immigrants scheme.Experimental results validate the efficiency of the proposed hybrid immigrants scheme for improving the performance of genetic algorithms in dynamic environments.     

Clustering by data competition

Clustering analysis is an unsupervised method to find out hidden structures in datasets.Most partitional clustering algorithms are sensitive to the selection of initial exemplars,the outliers and noise.In this paper,a novel technique called data competition algorithm is proposed to solve the problems.First the concept of aggregation field model is defined to describe the partitional clustering problem.Next,the exemplars are identified according to the data competition.Then,the members will be assigned to the suitable clusters.Data competition algorithm is able to avoid poor solutions caused by unlucky initializations,outliers and noise,and can be used to detect the coexpression gene,cluster the image,diagnose the disease,distinguish the variety,etc.The provided experimental results validate the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed schemes and show that the proposed approach of data competition algorithm is simple,stable and efficient.The experimental results also show that the proposed approach of data competition clustering outperforms three of the most well known clustering algorithms K-means clustering,affinity propagation clustering,hierarchical clustering.     

Experimental Study on Strategy of CombiningSAT Algorithms

The effectiveness of many SAT algorithms is mainly reflected by their significant performances on one or several classes of specific SAT problems.Different kinds of SAT algorithms all have their own hard instances respectively.Therefore,to get the better performance on all kinds of problems,SAT solver should know how to select different algorithms according to the feature of instances.In this paper the differences of several effective SAT algorithms are analyzed and two new parameters φand δ are proposed to characterize the feature of SAT instances.Experiments are performed to study the relationship between SAT algorithms and some statistical parameters including φ，δ.Based on this analysis,a strategy is presented for designing a faster SAT tester by carefully combining some existing SAT algorithms.With this strategy,a faster SAT tester to solve many kinds of SAT problem is obtained.     

Compact Differential Evolution Light: High Performance Despite Limited Memory Requirement and Modest Computational Overhead

Compact algorithms are Estimation of Distribution Algorithms which mimic the behavior of population-based algorithms by means of a probabilistic representation of the population of candidate solutions. These algorithms have a similar behaviour with respect to population-based algorithms but require a much smaller memory. This feature is crucially important in some engineering applications, especially in robotics. A high performance compact algorithm is the compact Differential Evolution (cDE) algorithm. This paper proposes a novel implementation of cDE, namely compact Differential Evolution light (cDElight), to address not only the memory saving necessities but also real-time requirements. cDElight employs two novel algorithmic modifications for employing a smaller computational overhead without a performance loss, with respect to cDE. Numerical results, carried out on a broad set of test problems, show that cDElight, despite its minimal hardware requirements, does not deteriorate the performance of cDE and thus is competitive with other memory saving and population-based algorithms. An application in the field of mobile robotics highlights the usability and advantages of the proposed approach.     

Verifying time Petri nets by linear programming

The paper proposes an approach to solving some verification problems of time petri nets using linear programming.The approach is based on the observation that for loop-closed time Ptri nets,it is only necessary to investigate a finite prefix of an untimed run of the underlying Petri net.Using the technique the paper gives solutions to reachabiltiy and bounded delay timing analysis problems.For both problems algorithms are given,that are decision procedures for loop-closed time Petri nets.and semi-decision procedures for general time Petri nets.     

An adaptive switching scheme for iterative computing in the cloud ,

Delta-based accumulative iterative computation （DAIC） model is currently proposed to support iterative algorithms in a synchronous or an asynchronous way. However, both the synchronous DAIC model and the asynchronous DAIC model only satisfy some given conditions, respectively, and perform poorly under other conditions either for high synchronization cost or for many redundant activations. As a result, the whole performance of both DAIC models suffers from the serious network jitter and load jitter caused by multi- tenancy in the cloud. In this paper, we develop a system, namely Hyblter, to guarantee the performance of iterative algorithms under different conditions. Through an adaptive execution model selection scheme, it can efficiently switch between synchronous and asynchronous DAIC model in order to be adapted to different conditions, always getting the best performance in the cloud. Experimental results show that our approach can improve the performance of current solutions up to 39.0%.     

一种基于混合高斯模型的多目标进化算法

目前,大多数多目标进化算法采用为单目标优化所设计的重组算子.通过证明或实验分析了几个典型的单目标优化重组算子并不适合某些多目标优化问题.提出了基于分解技术和混合高斯模型的多目标优化算法（multiobjective evolutionary algorithm based on decomposition and mixture Gaussian models,简称MOEA/D-MG）.该算法首先采用一个改进的混合高斯模型对群体建模并采样产生新个体,然后利用一个贪婪策略来更新群体.针对具有复杂Pareto前沿的多目标优化问题的测试结果表明,对给定的大多数测试题,该算法具有良好的效果.     

Variable mesh optimization for continuous optimization problems

Population-based meta-heuristics are algorithms that can obtain very good results for complex continuous optimization problems in a reduced amount of time. These search algorithms use a population of solutions to maintain an acceptable diversity level during the process, thus their correct distribution is crucial for the search. This paper introduces a new population meta-heuristic called “variable mesh optimization” (VMO), in which the set of nodes (potential solutions) are distributed as a mesh. This mesh is variable, because it evolves to maintain a controlled diversity (avoiding solutions too close to each other) and to guide it to the best solutions (by a mechanism of resampling from current nodes to its best neighbour). This proposal is compared with basic population-based meta-heuristics using a benchmark of multimodal continuous functions, showing that VMO is a competitive algorithm.     

MCEDA: A novel many-objective optimization approach based on model and clustering

To solve many-objective optimization problems (MaOPs) by evolutionary algorithms (EAs), the maintenance of convergence and diversity is essential and difficult. Improved multi-objective optimization evolutionary algorithms (MOEAs), usually based on the genetic algorithm (GA), have been applied to MaOPs, which use the crossover and mutation operators of GAs to generate new solutions. In this paper, a new approach, based on decomposition and the MOEA/D framework, is proposed: model and clustering based estimation of distribution algorithm (MCEDA). MOEA/D means the multi-objective evolutionary algorithm based on decomposition. The proposed MCEDA is a new estimation of distribution algorithm (EDA) framework, which is intended to extend the application of estimation of distribution algorithm to MaOPs. MCEDA was implemented by two similar algorithm, MCEDA/B (based on bits model) and MCEDA/RM (based on regular model) to deal with MaOPs. In MCEDA, the problem is decomposed into several subproblems. For each subproblem, clustering algorithm is applied to divide the population into several subgroups. On each subgroup, an estimation model is created to generate the new population. In this work, two kinds of models are adopted, the new proposed bits model and the regular model used in RM-MEDA (a regularity model based multi-objective estimation of distribution algorithm). The non-dominated selection operator is applied to improve convergence. The proposed algorithms have been tested on the benchmark test suite for evolutionary algorithms (DTLZ). The comparison with several state-of-the-art algorithms indicates that the proposed MCEDA is a competitive and promising approach.     

随机算法重启策略的构造及其在TSP中的应用

NP难解问题是计算机算法和理论界长期研究的课题。在求实NP难解问题时，随机算法的性能往往很不稳定。在以往的实验中，人们发现基于重启的优化方法可以提高Las Vegas算法的性能和稳定性。尽管它的思想比较直观，但对它的性能进行理论分析却并不容易，这在很大程度上限制了其应用。该文使用连续概率分布对算法性能分布建模，针对Las Vegas算法提出了一种高效的重启策略构造方法。该文从平均性能和稳定性两个角度分析了该方法的效率，同时通过将其应用于求解大规模旅行商问题（TSP）显示了其应用价值。     

Graphical model based continuous estimation of distribution algorithm

In this paper, a new estimation of distribution algorithm is introduced. The goal is to propose a method that avoids complex approximations of learning a probabilistic graphical model and considers multivariate dependencies between continuous random variables. A parallel model of some subgraphs with a smaller number of variables is learned as the probabilistic graphical model. In each generation, the joint probability distribution of the selected solutions is estimated using a Gaussian Mixture model. Then, learning the graphical model of dependencies among random variables and sampling are done separately for each Gaussian component. In the learning step, using the selected solutions of each Gaussian mixture component, the structure of a Markov network is learned. This network is decomposed to maximal cliques and a clique graph. Then, complete Bayesian network structures are learned for these subgraphs using an optimization algorithm. The proposed optimization problem is a 0–1 constrained quadratic programming which finds the best permutation of variables. Then, sampling is done from each Bayesian network of each Gaussian component. The introduced method is compared with the other network-based estimation of distribution algorithms for optimization of continuous numerical functions.     

基于IFI与FUA的Pareto遗传算法

在适应值快速辨识算法和基于聚类排挤的外部种群快速替换算法的基础上，提出了搜索Pareto最优解集的快速遗传算法。在该算法中，IFI算法实现个体适应值的快速辨识，FUA维持种群多样度和Pareto最优解集的均匀分布性。采用FPGA算法对多种多目标0/1背包问题进行仿真优化，FPGA算法能够以较少的计算成本搜索到高精度、分布均匀、高质量的Pareto非劣解集，收敛速度和收敛准确性均优于强度Pareto进化算法(SPEA)。     

A new real-coded Bayesian optimization algorithm based on a team of learning automata for continuous optimization

Estimation of distribution algorithms have evolved as a technique for estimating population distribution in evolutionary algorithms. They estimate the distribution of the candidate solutions and then sample the next generation from the estimated distribution. Bayesian optimization algorithm is an estimation of distribution algorithm, which uses a Bayesian network to estimate the distribution of candidate solutions and then generates the next generation by sampling from the constructed network. The experimental results show that the Bayesian optimization algorithms are capable of identifying correct linkage between the variables of optimization problems. Since the problem of finding the optimal Bayesian network belongs to the class of NP-hard problems, typically Bayesian optimization algorithms use greedy algorithms to build the Bayesian network. This paper proposes a new real-coded Bayesian optimization algorithm for solving continuous optimization problems that uses a team of learning automata to build the Bayesian network. This team of learning automata tries to learn the optimal Bayesian network structure during the execution of the algorithm. The use of learning automaton leads to an algorithm with lower computation time for building the Bayesian network. The experimental results reported here show the preference of the proposed algorithm on both uni-modal and multi-modal optimization problems.     

基于分布估计算法的连续函数全局优化问题研究

分布估计算法从宏观的角度建立一个概率模型,用来描述解空间的分布,从而通过进化计算获得优势个体。目前,离散型分布估计算法研究已经比较成熟,而连续型分布估计算法研究进展缓慢。采用均匀分布缩小采样领域的思想,设计新的分布估计算法求解连续型优化问题。实验数据表明,该分布估计算法对于求解连续型问题是有效的。     

ADAPTIVE MULTI-OBJECTIVE OPTIMIZATION BASED ON NONDOMINATED SOLUTIONS

An adaptive hybrid model (AHM) based on nondominated solutions is presented in this study for multi-objective optimization problems (MOPs). In this model, three search phases are devised according to the number of nondominated solutions in the current population: 1) emphasizing the dominated solutions when the population contains very few nondominated solutions; 2) maintaining the balance between nondominated and dominated solutions when nondominated ones become more; 3) when the population consists of adequate nondominated solutions, dominated ones could be ignored and the isolated nondominated ones are allocated more computational budget by their crowding distance values for heuristic search. To exploit local information efficiently, a local incremental search algorithm, LISA, is proposed and merged into the model. This model maintains the adaptive mechanism between the optimization process by the online discovered nondominated solutions. The proposed model is validated using five ZDT and five DTLZ problems. Compared with three other state-of-the-art multi-objective algorithms, namely NSGA-II, SPEA2, and PESA-II, AHM achieves comparable results in terms of convergence and diversity metrics. Finally, the sensitivity of introduced parameters and scalability to the number of objectives are investigated.     

A regularity model-based multiobjective estimation of distribution algorithm with reducing redundant cluster operator

A regularity model-based multiobjective estimation of distribution algorithm (RM-MEDA) has been proposed for solving continuous multiobjective optimization problems with variable linkages. RM-MEDA is a kind of estimation of distribution algorithms and, therefore, modeling plays a critical role. In RM-MEDA, the population is split into several clusters to build the model. Moreover, the fixed number of clusters is recommended in RM-MEDA when solving different kinds of problems. However, based on our experiments, we find that the number of clusters is problem-dependent and has a significant effect on the performance of RM-MEDA. Motivated by the above observation, in this paper we improve the clustering process and propose a reducing redundant cluster operator (RRCO) to build more precise model during the evolution. By combining RRCO with RM-MEDA, we present an improved version of RM-MEDA, named IRM-MEDA. In this paper, we also construct four additional continuous multiobjective optimization test instances. The experimental results have shown that IRM-MEDA outperforms RM-MEDA in terms of efficiency and effectiveness. In particular, IRM-MEDA performs on average 31.67% faster than RM-MEDA.