THE DESIGN AND ANALYSIS OF EXPERIMENTS. By Oscar Kempthorne. New York, John Wiley and Sons, Inc., 1952. 631 pp. $8.50. This book by a teacher of statistics (as well as a consultant for \"experimenters\") is a comprehensive study of the philosophical background for the statistical design of experiment. It is necessary to have some facility with algebraic notation and manipulation to be able to use the volume intelligently. The problems are presented from the theoretical point of view, without such practical examples as would be helpful for those not acquainted with mathematics. The mathematical justification for the techniques is given. As a somewhat advanced treatment of the design and analysis of experiments, this volume will be interesting and helpful for many who approach statistics theoretically as well as practically. With emphasis on the \"why,\" and with description given broadly, the author relates the subject matter to the general theory of statistics and to the general problem of experimental inference. MARGARET J. ROBERTSON

The Design and Analysis of Experiments

Grey Wolf Optimizer

Data Mining Practical Machine Learning Tools and Techniques

The Whale Optimization Algorithm

Differential evolution (DE) is arguably one of the most powerful stochastic real-parameter optimization algorithms in current use. DE operates through similar computational steps as employed by a standard evolutionary algorithm (EA). However, unlike traditional EAs, the DE-variants perturb the current-generation population members with the scaled differences of randomly selected and distinct population members. Therefore, no separate probability distribution has to be used for generating the offspring. Since its inception in 1995, DE has drawn the attention of many researchers all over the world resulting in a lot of variants of the basic algorithm with improved performance. This paper presents a detailed review of the basic concepts of DE and a survey of its major variants, its application to multiobjective, constrained, large scale, and uncertain optimization problems, and the theoretical studies conducted on DE so far. Also, it provides an overview of the significant engineering applications that have benefited from the powerful nature of DE.

/pdf/differential-evolution-a-survey-of-the-state-of-the-art-3lz840pz2t.pdf

Differential Evolution: A Survey of the State-of-the-Art

One important issue addressed by software companies is to determine which features should be included in the next release of their products, in such a way that the highest possible number of customers get satisfied while entailing the minimum cost for the company. This problem is known as the Next Release Problem (NRP). Since minimizing the total cost of including new features into a software package and maximizing the total satisfaction of customers are contradictory objectives, the problem has a multi-objective nature. In this work, we apply three state-of-the-art multi-objective metaheuristics (two genetic algorithms, NSGA-II and MOCell, and one evolutionary strategy, PAES) for solving NRP. Our goal is twofold: on the one hand, we are interested in analyzing the results obtained by these metaheuristics over a benchmark composed of six academic problems plus a real world data set provided by Motorola; on the other hand, we want to provide insight about the solution to the problem. The obtained results show three different kinds of conclusions: NSGA-II is the technique computing the highest number of optimal solutions, MOCell provides the product manager with the widest range of different solutions, and PAES is the fastest technique (but with the least accurate results). Furthermore, we have observed that the best solutions found so far are composed of a high percentage of low-cost requirements and of those requirements that produce the largest satisfaction on the customers as well.

A study of the bi-objective next release problem

Computational grids are an important emerging paradigm for large-scale distributed computing. As grid systems become more wide-spread, techniques for efficiently exploiting the large amount of grid computing resources become increasingly indispensable. A key aspect in order to benefit from these resources is the scheduling of jobs to grid resources. Due to the complex nature of grid systems, the design of efficient grid schedulers becomes challenging since such schedulers have to be able to optimize many conflicting criteria in very short periods of time. In this work we exploit the capabilities of cellular memetic algorithms (cMAs) for obtaining efficient batch schedulers for grid systems. A careful design of the cMA methods and operators for the problem yielded to an efficient and robust implementation. Our experimental study, based on a known static benchmark for the problem, shows that this heuristic approach is able to deliver very high quality planning of jobs to grid nodes and thus it can be used to design efficient dynamic schedulers for real grid systems. Such dynamic schedulers can be obtained by running the cMA-based scheduler in batch mode for a very short time to schedule jobs arriving to the system since the last activation of the cMA scheduler.

/pdf/efficient-batch-job-scheduling-in-grids-using-cellular-5eg8byp3l7.pdf

Efficient Batch Job Scheduling in Grids using Cellular Memetic Algorithms

Model Checking is a well-known and fully automatic technique forchecking software properties, usually given as temporal logicformulae on the program variables. Most model checkers found inthe literature use exact deterministic algorithms to check theproperties. These algorithms usually require huge amounts ofcomputational resources if the checked model is large. We proposehere the use of a new kind of Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) model, ACOhg, to refute safety properties in concurrent systems. ACO algorithms are stochastic techniques belonging to the class of metaheuristic algorithms and inspired by the foraging behaviour of real ants. The traditional ACO algorithms cannot deal with the model checking problem and thus we use ACOhg to tackle it. The results state that ACOhg algorithms find optimal or near optimal error trails in faulty concurrent systems with a reduced amount of resources, outperforming algorithms that are the state-of-the-art in model checking. This fact makes them suitable for checking safety properties in large concurrent systems, in which traditional techniques fail to find errors because of the model size.

/pdf/finding-safety-errors-with-aco-36yrtsynzd.pdf

Finding safety errors with ACO

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) allow, thanks to the use of small wireless devices known as sensor nodes, the monitorization of wide and remote areas with precision and liveness unseen to the date without the intervention of a human operator. For many WSN applications it is fundamental to achieve full coverage of the terrain monitored, known as sensor field. The next major concerns are the energetic efficiency of the network, in order to increase its lifetime, and having the minimum possible number of sensor nodes, in order to reduce the network cost. The task of placing the sensor nodes while addressing these objectives is known as WSN layout problem. In this paper we address a WSN layout problem instance in which full coverage is treated as a constraint while the other two objectives are optimized using a multi- objective approach. We employ a set of multi-objective optimization algorithms for this problem where we define the energy efficiency and the number of nodes as the independent optimization objectives. Our results prove the efficiency of multi-objective metaheuristics to solve this kind of problem and encourage further research on more realistic instances and more constrained scenarios.

/pdf/optimal-sensor-network-layout-using-multi-objective-1lfk1mantw.pdf

Optimal Sensor Network Layout Using Multi-Objective Metaheuristics

The MALLBA project tackles the resolution of combinatorial optimization problems using generic algorithmic skeletons implemented in C++. A skeleton in the MALLBA library implements an optimization method in one of the three families of generic optimization techniques offered: exact, heuristic and hybrid. Moreover, for each of those methods, MALLBA provides three different implementations: sequential, parallel for Local Area Networks, and parallel for Wide Area Networks. This paper introduces the architecture of the MALLBA library, details some of the implemented skeletons, and offers computational results for some classical optimization problems to show the viability of our library. Among other conclusions, we claim that the design used to develop the optimization techniques included in the library is generic and efficient at the same time.

/pdf/efficient-parallel-lan-wan-algorithms-for-optimization-the-bt5f4y0pef.pdf

Enrique Alba

Papers

A study of the bi-objective next release problem

Efficient Batch Job Scheduling in Grids using Cellular Memetic Algorithms

Finding safety errors with ACO

Optimal Sensor Network Layout Using Multi-Objective Metaheuristics

Efficient parallel LAN/WAN algorithms for optimization. The mallba project