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On the Latent Structure of the bbob-biobj Test Suite

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Applications of Evolutionary Computation (EvoApplications 2024)

Abstract

Landscape analysis is a popular method for the characterization of black-box optimization problems. It consists of a sequence of operations that, from a limited sample of solutions, approximate and describe the hypersurfaces formed by characteristic problem properties. The hypersurfaces, called problem landscapes, are described by sets of carefully crafted features that ought to capture their characteristic properties. In this way, arbitrary optimization problems with potentially very different technical parameters, such as search space dimensionality, are projected into specific feature spaces where they can be further studied. The representation of a problem in a feature space can be used, for example, to find similar problems and identify metaheuristic optimization algorithms that have the best track record on the same type of tasks. Because of that, the quality and properties of problem representation in the feature spaces gain importance. In this work, we study the representation properties of the popular bbob-biobj test suite in the space of bi-objective features, analyze the structure naturally emerging in the feature space, and analyze the high-level properties of the projection. The obtained results clearly demonstrate the discrepancies between the latent structure of the test suite and its expert perception.

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Acknowledgment

This work is part of the project “Constrained Multiobjective Optimization Based on Problem Landscape Analysis” co-funded by the Czech Science Foundation (grant no. GF22-34873K) and the Slovenian Research and Innovation Agency (project no. N2-0254). Furthermore, the Czech authors acknowledge support from the Student Grant System, grants no. SP2024/006 and SP2024/007, VSB – Technical University of Ostrava, and the Slovenian authors acknowledge additional financial support from the Slovenian Research and Innovation Agency (research core funding no. P2-0209). The publication is also based upon work from COST Action CA22137 “Randomised Optimisation Algorithms Research Network” (ROAR-NET), supported by European Cooperation in Science and Technology (COST).

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Krömer, P., Uher, V., Tušar, T., Filipič, B. (2024). On the Latent Structure of the bbob-biobj Test Suite. In: Smith, S., Correia, J., Cintrano, C. (eds) Applications of Evolutionary Computation. EvoApplications 2024. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 14635. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-56855-8_20

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-56855-8_20

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