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

Over the last three decades, a large number of evolutionary algorithms have been developed for solving multi-objective optimization problems. However, there lacks an upto-date and comprehensive software platform for researchers to properly benchmark existing algorithms and for practitioners to apply selected algorithms to solve their real-world problems. The demand of such a common tool becomes even more urgent, when the source code of many proposed algorithms has not been made publicly available. To address these issues, we have developed a MATLAB platform for evolutionary multi-objective optimization in this paper, called PlatEMO, which includes more than 50 multiobjective evolutionary algorithms and more than 100 multi-objective test problems, along with several widely used performance indicators. With a user-friendly graphical user interface, PlatEMO enables users to easily compare several evolutionary algorithms at one time and collect statistical results in Excel or LaTeX files. More importantly, PlatEMO is completely open source, such that users are able to develop new algorithms on the basis of it. This paper introduces the main features of PlatEMO and illustrates how to use it for performing comparative experiments, embedding new algorithms, creating new test problems, and developing performance indicators. Source code of PlatEMO is now available at: http://bimk.ahu.edu.cn/index.php?s=/Index/Software/index.html.

PlatEMO: A MATLAB Platform for Evolutionary Multi-Objective Optimization [Educational Forum]

Achieving balance between convergence and diversity is a key issue in evolutionary multiobjective optimization. Most existing methodologies, which have demonstrated their niche on various practical problems involving two and three objectives, face significant challenges in many-objective optimization. This paper suggests a unified paradigm, which combines dominance- and decomposition-based approaches, for many-objective optimization. Our major purpose is to exploit the merits of both dominance- and decomposition-based approaches to balance the convergence and diversity of the evolutionary process. The performance of our proposed method is validated and compared with four state-of-the-art algorithms on a number of unconstrained benchmark problems with up to 15 objectives. Empirical results fully demonstrate the superiority of our proposed method on all considered test instances. In addition, we extend this method to solve constrained problems having a large number of objectives. Compared to two other recently proposed constrained optimizers, our proposed method shows highly competitive performance on all the constrained optimization problems.

An Evolutionary Many-Objective Optimization Algorithm Based on Dominance and Decomposition

Over the last three decades, a large number of evolutionary algorithms have been developed for solving multiobjective
optimization problems. However, there lacks an up-to-date and comprehensive software platform for
researchers to properly benchmark existing algorithms and for practitioners to apply selected algorithms to solve
their real-world problems. The demand of such a common tool becomes even more urgent, when the source code
of many proposed algorithms has not been made publicly available. To address these issues, we have developed
a MATLAB platform for evolutionary multi-objective optimization in this paper, called PlatEMO, which includes
more than 50 multi-objective evolutionary algorithms and more than 100 multi-objective test problems, along with
several widely used performance indicators. With a user-friendly graphical user interface, PlatEMO enables users
to easily compare several evolutionary algorithms at one time and collect statistical results in Excel or LaTeX files.
More importantly, PlatEMO is completely open source, such that users are able to develop new algorithms on the
basis of it. This paper introduces the main features of PlatEMO and illustrates how to use it for performing comparative
experiments, embedding new algorithms, creating new test problems, and developing performance indicators.
Source code of PlatEMO is now available at: http://bimk.ahu.edu.cn/index.php?s=/Index/Software/index.html.

PlatEMO: A MATLAB Platform for Evolutionary Multi-Objective Optimization

Lecture Notes in Economics and Mathematical Systems

Evolutionary multiobjective optimization (EMO) methodologies have gained popularity in finding a representative set of Pareto optimal solutions in the past decade and beyond. Several techniques have been proposed in the specialized literature to ensure good convergence and diversity of the obtained solutions. However, in real world applications, the decision maker is not interested in the overall Pareto optimal front since the final decision is a unique solution. Recently, there has been an increased emphasis in addressing the decision-making task in searching for the most preferred alternatives. In this paper, we introduce a new variant of the Pareto dominance relation, called r-dominance, which has the ability to create a strict partial order among Pareto-equivalent solutions. This fact makes such a relation able to guide the search toward the interesting parts of the Pareto optimal region based on the decision maker's preferences expressed as a set of aspiration levels. After integrating the new dominance relation in the NSGA-II methodology, the efficacy and the usefulness of the modified procedure are assessed through two to ten-objective test problems a priori and interactively. Moreover, the proposed approach provides competitive and better results when compared to other recently proposed preference-based EMO approaches.

The r-Dominance: A New Dominance Relation for Interactive Evolutionary Multicriteria Decision Making

Recent advances in computational intelligent systems have focused on addressing complex problems related to the dynamicity of the environments. In increasing number of real world applications, data are presented as streams that may evolve over time and this is known by concept drift. Handling concept drift is becoming an attractive topic of research that concerns multidisciplinary domains such that machine learning, data mining, ubiquitous knowledge discovery, statistic decision theory, etc... Therefore, a rich body of the literature has been devoted to the study of methods and techniques for handling drifting data. However, this literature is fairly dispersed and it does not define guidelines for choosing an appropriate approach for a given application. Hence, the main objective of this survey is to present an ease understanding of the concept drift issues and related works, in order to help researchers from different disciplines to consider concept drift handling in their applications. This survey covers different facets of existing approaches, evokes discussion and helps readers to underline the sharp criteria that allow them to properly design their own approach. For this purpose, a new categorization of the existing state-of-the-art is presented with criticisms, future tendencies and not-yet-addressed challenges.

Discussion and review on evolving data streams and concept drift adapting

We propose in this paper a generic algorithm based on ant colony optimization to solve multi-objective optimization problems. The proposed algorithm is parameterized by the number of ant colonies and the number of pheromone trails. We compare different variants of this algorithm on the multi-objective knapsack problem. We compare also the obtained results with other evolutionary algorithms from the literature.

/pdf/ant-colony-optimization-for-multi-objective-optimization-49wklik9wb.pdf

Ant Colony Optimization for Multi-Objective Optimization Problems

A novel chemical reaction optimization for the distributed permutation flowshop scheduling problem with makespan criterion

Evolutionary Algorithms (EAs) have been recognized to be well suited to approximate the Pareto front of Multi-objective Optimization Problems (MOPs). In reality, the Decision Maker (DM) is not interested in discovering the whole Pareto front rather than finding only the portion(s) of the front that matches at most his/her preferences. Recently, several studies have addressed the decision-making task to assist the DM in choosing the final alternative. Knee regions are potential parts of the Pareto front presenting the maximal trade-offs between objectives. Solutions residing in knee regions are characterized by the fact that a small improvement in either objective will cause a large deterioration in at least another one which makes moving in either direction not attractive. Thus, in the absence of explicit DM’s preferences, we suppose that knee regions represent the DM’s preferences themselves. Recently, few works were proposed to find knee regions. This paper represents a further study in this direction. Hence, we propose a new evolutionary method, denoted TKR-NSGA-II, to discover knee regions of the Pareto front. In this method, the population is guided gradually by means of a set of mobile reference points. Since the reference points are updated based on trade-off information, the population converges towards knee region centers which allows the construction of a neighborhood of solutions in each knee. The performance assessment of the proposed algorithm is done on two- and three-objective knee-based test problems. The obtained results show the ability of the algorithm to: (1) find the Pareto optimal knee regions, (2) control the extent (We mean by extent the breadth/spread of the obtained knee region.) of the obtained regions independently of the geometry of the front and (3) provide competitive and better results when compared to other recently proposed methods. Moreover, we propose an interactive version of TKR-NSGA-II which is useful when the DM has no a priori information about the number of existing knees in the Pareto optimal front.

Khaled Ghedira

Papers

The r-Dominance: A New Dominance Relation for Interactive Evolutionary Multicriteria Decision Making

Discussion and review on evolving data streams and concept drift adapting

Ant Colony Optimization for Multi-Objective Optimization Problems

A novel chemical reaction optimization for the distributed permutation flowshop scheduling problem with makespan criterion

Searching for knee regions of the Pareto front using mobile reference points