Tuning Parameters across Mixed Dimensional Instances: A Performance Scalability Study of Sep-G-CMA-ES

by  Tianjun Liao, Marco A. Montes de Oca, and Thomas Stützle
April 2011

Submitted to workshop of Scaling Behaviours of Landscapes, Parameters and Algorithms in GECCO 2011.
  1. Paper Abstract
  2. Box-plots on all dimensions.

 

Paper Abstract

Sep-G-CMA-ES is a variant of G-CMA-ES with lower time complexity. In this paper, we evaluate the impact that various ways of tuning have on the performance of Sep-G-CMA-ES on scalable continuous benchmark functions. We have extracted seven parameters from Sep-G-CMA-ES and tuned them across training functions with different features using an automatic algorithm configuration tool called Iterated F-Race. The best performance of Sep-G-CMA-ES was obtained when it was tuned using functions of different dimensionality (a strategy that we call mixed dimensional ). Our comparative study on scalable benchmark functions also shows that the default Sep-G-CMA-ES outperforms G-CMA-ES. Moreover, the tuned version of Sep-G-CMA-ES significantly improves over both G-CMA-ES and default Sep- G-CMA-ES.

Keywords: Sep-G-CMA-ES, Large scale continuous optimization, Parameter tuning, Mixed dimensions

Box-plots of comparison on all dimensions of SOCO functions

 

Comparison results on 50 dimentions

Comparison results on 100 dimentions

Comparison results on 200 dimentions

Comparison results on 500 dimentions

Comparison results on 1000 dimentions