A tunable real-world multi-funnel benchmark problem for evolutionary optimization: And why parallel island models might remedy the failure of CMA-ES on it

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Contributors

Abstract

A common shortcoming in the Evolutionary Computation (EC) community is that the publication of many search heuristics is not accompanied by rigorous benchmarks on a balanced set of test problems. A welcome effort to promote such test suites are the IEEE CEC competitions on real-valued black-box optimization. These competitions prescribe carefully designed synthetic test functions and benchmarking protocols. They do, however, not contain tunable real-world examples of the important class of multi-funnel functions. We argue that finding minimum-energy configurations of 38-atom Lennard-Jones (LJ38) clusters could serve as such a benchmark for real-valued, single-objective evolutionary optimization. We thus suggest that this problem be included in EC studies whenever general-purpose optimizers are proposed. The problem is tunable from a single-funnel to a double-funnel topology. We show that the winner of the CEC 2005 competition, the Evolution Strategy with Covariance Matrix Adaptation (CMA-ES), works on the single-funnel version of this test case, but fails on the double-funnel version. We further argue that this performance loss of CMA-ES can be relaxed by using parallel island models. We support this hypothesis by simulation results of a parallel island CMA-ES, the Particle Swarm CMA-ES, on a subset of the multi-funnel functions in the CEC 2005 benchmark.

Details

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationIJCCI 2009 - International Joint Conference on Computational Intelligence, Proceedings
Pages248-253
Number of pages6
Publication statusPublished - 2009
Peer-reviewedYes

Publication series

SeriesIJCCI 2009 - International Joint Conference on Computational Intelligence, Proceedings

Conference

Title1st International Joint Conference on Computational Intelligence, IJCCI 2009
Duration5 - 7 October 2009
CityFunchal, Madeira
CountryPortugal

External IDs

ORCID /0000-0003-4414-4340/work/159608328

Keywords

Keywords

  • Benchmark, CMA-ES, Lennard-Jones cluster, Multi-funnel landscape, Parallel island model