{"title":"Genotype Diversity Measures for Escaping Plateau Regions in University Course Timetabling","authors":"James Sakal, J. Fieldsend, E. Keedwell","doi":"10.1145/3583133.3596334","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/3583133.3596334","url":null,"abstract":"University course timetabling is a well-known problem in combinatorial optimization. When using evolutionary algorithms to solve it as a many-objective problem, measures aimed at encouraging population diversity are commonly applied in the objective value space. Difficulties can arise when the search encounters plateau regions, caused by multiple designs evaluating to a common objective vector. To address this, we propose an enhanced diversity procedure that includes genotype crowding as an additional integrated selection criterion behind dominance and phenotype diversity. We also introduce a standard form encoding to handle solution equivalence and reduce metric entropy. Four metrics and a baseline are tested across problems from the International Timetabling Competition 2007 Track 3 benchmark, using a solver based on NSGA-III. Hyper-volume is the primary performance measure. We find that genotype Hamming distance performs best. This goes against our intuition that the use of metrics closer approximating the Levenshtein distance would lead to superior performance.","PeriodicalId":422029,"journal":{"name":"Proceedings of the Companion Conference on Genetic and Evolutionary Computation","volume":"32 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-07-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"121525395","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Theoretical Limits on the Success of Lexicase Selection Under Contradictory Objectives","authors":"Shakiba Shahbandegan, Emily L. Dolson","doi":"10.1145/3583133.3590714","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/3583133.3590714","url":null,"abstract":"Lexicase selection is a state of the art parent selection technique for problems that can be broken down into multiple selection criteria. Prior work has found cases where lexicase selection fails to find a Pareto-optimal solution due to the presence of multiple objectives that contradict each other. In other cases, however, lexicase selection has performed well despite the presence of such objectives. Here, we develop theory identifying circumstances under which lexicase selection will or will not fail to find a Pareto-optimal solution. Ultimately, we find that lexicase selection can perform well under many circumstances involving contradictory objectives, but that there are limits to the parameter spaces where high performance is possible. Additionally, we show empirical evidence that epsilon-lexicase selection is much more strongly impacted by contradictory objectives. Our results inform parameter value decisions under lexicase selection and decisions about which problems to use lexicase selection for.","PeriodicalId":422029,"journal":{"name":"Proceedings of the Companion Conference on Genetic and Evolutionary Computation","volume":"9 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-07-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"121071762","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Jose Quevedo, Maxi Heer, Marwan F. Abdelatti, Resit Sendag, M. Sodhi
{"title":"Performance Comparison of Steady State GAs and Generational GAs for Capacitated Vehicle Routing Problems","authors":"Jose Quevedo, Maxi Heer, Marwan F. Abdelatti, Resit Sendag, M. Sodhi","doi":"10.1145/3583133.3590614","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/3583133.3590614","url":null,"abstract":"This paper presents a comparison on performances between the Coarse-Grained Steady-State Genetic Algorithm (SSGA) and the Generational Genetic Algorithm (GGA) on benchmark problems of the Capacitated Vehicle Routing Problem (CVRP). A statistical fractional multi-factorial design of experiments is done to find optimal parameter settings for the SSGA, while the best settings for the GGA were taken from aprevious study. The GAs were compared pairwise on problems of various sizes, with results indicating the SSGA outperforms the GGA on all the problems. A pooled statistical test further support this, with a p-value less than 0.05%, further proving the SSGA is significantly better than the GGA.","PeriodicalId":422029,"journal":{"name":"Proceedings of the Companion Conference on Genetic and Evolutionary Computation","volume":"23 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-07-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"116096627","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Philipp Fleck, Stephan M. Winkler, M. Kommenda, Sara Silva, L. Vanneschi, M. Affenzeller
{"title":"Evolutionary Algorithms for Segment Optimization in Vectorial GP","authors":"Philipp Fleck, Stephan M. Winkler, M. Kommenda, Sara Silva, L. Vanneschi, M. Affenzeller","doi":"10.1145/3583133.3590668","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/3583133.3590668","url":null,"abstract":"Vectorial Genetic Programming (Vec-GP) extends regular GP by allowing vectorial input features (e.g. time series data), while retaining the expressiveness and interpretability of regular GP. The availability of raw vectorial data during training, not only enables Vec-GP to select appropriate aggregation functions itself, but also allows Vec-GP to extract segments from vectors prior to aggregation (like windows for time series data). This is a critical factor in many machine learning applications, as vectors can be very long and only small segments may be relevant. However, allowing aggregation over segments within GP models makes the training more complicated. We explore the use of common evolutionary algorithms to help GP identify appropriate segments, which we analyze using a simplified problem that focuses on optimizing aggregation segments on fixed data. Since the studied algorithms are to be used in GP for local optimization (e.g. as mutation operator), we evaluate not only the quality of the solutions, but also take into account the convergence speed and anytime performance. Among the evaluated algorithms, CMA-ES, PSO and ALPS show the most promising results, which would be prime candidates for evaluation within GP.","PeriodicalId":422029,"journal":{"name":"Proceedings of the Companion Conference on Genetic and Evolutionary Computation","volume":"20 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-07-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115765511","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"An Ant Colony Algorithm Assisted by Graph Neural Networks for Solving Vehicle Routing Problems","authors":"Xiangyu Wang, Yaochu Jin","doi":"10.1145/3583133.3596424","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/3583133.3596424","url":null,"abstract":"Vehicle routing problems have attracted increasing attention because of the rapid development of transportation. Companies want to reduce the cost by lowering the number of vehicles and the total distances, which can be considered as a combinatorial optimization problem. The ant colony algorithm shows great potential in solving vehicle routing problems. However, it suffers from a low convergence speed due to the randomly initialized pheromone, which may cause a waste of computational resources in the early search process. To address this problem, a graph neural network is pre-trained to provide prior knowledge to initialize the pheromone in the ant colony algorithm, which can boost the convergence process. In addition, some classic local research methods are applied to balance the exploration and exploitation of the evolutionary process.","PeriodicalId":422029,"journal":{"name":"Proceedings of the Companion Conference on Genetic and Evolutionary Computation","volume":"287 ","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-07-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"120974862","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Tree-Based Grammatical Evolution with Non-Encoding Nodes","authors":"Marina de la Cruz López, O. Garnica, J. Hidalgo","doi":"10.1145/3583133.3596944","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/3583133.3596944","url":null,"abstract":"Grammar-guided genetic programming is a type of genetic programming that uses a grammar to restrict the solutions in the exploration of the search space. Different representations of grammar-guided genetic programming exist, each with specific properties that affect how the evolutionary process is developed. We propose a new representation that uses a tree structure with non-encoding nodes for the individuals in the population, a.k.a. Tree-Based Grammatical Evolution with Non-Encoding Nodes. Each tree's node has a set of children nodes and an associated number that determines which are used in decoding the solution and which are non-encoding nodes. This representation increases the size and complexity of the individuals while performing a more exhaustive exploration of the solution space. We compare the performance of our proposal with state-of-the-art genetic programming algorithms for the 11-multiplexer benchmark, showing encouraging results.","PeriodicalId":422029,"journal":{"name":"Proceedings of the Companion Conference on Genetic and Evolutionary Computation","volume":"31 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-07-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"116649522","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Addressing the Health Versus Economy Dilemma in Data-Driven Policymaking During a Pandemic","authors":"Lewis Hotchkiss, A. Rahat","doi":"10.1145/3583133.3590652","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/3583133.3590652","url":null,"abstract":"The recent COVID-19 pandemic highlighted a need for tools to help policy-makers make informed decisions on what policies to implement in order to reduce the impact of the pandemic. Several tools have previously been developed to model how non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs), such as social distancing, affect the rate of growth of a disease within a population. Much of the focus of the modelling effort have been on projections of health factors, relating them to the NPIs, with only few works addressing the health-economy trade-off. However, there is a particular gap in illustrations of real data-driven solutions in this area. In this paper, we proposed a purely data-driven framework where we modelled health and economic impacts with Bayesian and Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) models respectively, and used NSGA-II to identify policy stringencies over a three-week period. We demonstrate that this framework can produce a range of solutions trading off between health and economy projections based on real data, that may be used by policymakers to reach an informed decision.","PeriodicalId":422029,"journal":{"name":"Proceedings of the Companion Conference on Genetic and Evolutionary Computation","volume":"27 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-07-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"121686505","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Landscape Analysis of Optimization Problems and Algorithms","authors":"K. Malan, G. Ochoa","doi":"10.1145/3583133.3595051","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/3583133.3595051","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":422029,"journal":{"name":"Proceedings of the Companion Conference on Genetic and Evolutionary Computation","volume":"29 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-07-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"124944454","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"A comprehensive and brief survey on interactive evolutionary computation in sound and music composition for algorithmic auditory and acoustic design with human-in-the-loop","authors":"Yan Pei","doi":"10.1145/3583133.3596301","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/3583133.3596301","url":null,"abstract":"We present a comprehensive survey on the topic of sound and music composition using interactive evolutionary computation (IEC). After explaining the fundamentals of IEC and computer music, we investigate the research subject from various aspects, including the presentation of sound and music in computer programming, IEC optimization algorithm studies, fitness function design, and interface design and evaluation methods in IEC. These subjects drive the theoretical study in this field. There are a variety of studies addressing IEC application-oriented studies, and we summarize the findings related to auditory and acoustic design with IEC. Knowledge discovery of auditory perception with IEC and IEC for auditory aid are two unique research subjects using IEC. Finally, we discuss potential research directions and subjects, including IEC for physiological and psychological research of auditory and the extension of IEC into the acoustic design of long-time music genres. IEC is not only a technique for optimization in auditory and acoustic design with human factors but also an implementation tool to achieve intelligent composition systems and creative art design with human-in-the-loop. It is a powerful tool to implement an artificial intelligence system with more considerations of human factors.","PeriodicalId":422029,"journal":{"name":"Proceedings of the Companion Conference on Genetic and Evolutionary Computation","volume":"4 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-07-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"125276430","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Martin Fyvie, J. Mccall, Lee A. Christie, A. Brownlee
{"title":"Explaining a Staff Rostering Genetic Algorithm using Sensitivity Analysis and Trajectory Analysis.","authors":"Martin Fyvie, J. Mccall, Lee A. Christie, A. Brownlee","doi":"10.1145/3583133.3596353","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/3583133.3596353","url":null,"abstract":"In the field of Explainable AI, population-based search metaheuristics are of growing interest as they become more widely used in critical applications. The ability to relate key information regarding algorithm behaviour and drivers of solution quality to an end-user is vital. This paper investigates a novel method of explanatory feature extraction based on analysis of the search trajectory and compares the results to those of sensitivity analysis using \"Weighted Ranked Biased Overlap\". We apply these techniques to search trajectories generated by a genetic algorithm as it solves a staff rostering problem. We show that there is a significant overlap between these two explainability methods when identifying subsets of rostered workers whose allocations are responsible for large portions of fitness change in an optimization run. Both methods identify similar patterns in sensitivity, but our method also draws out additional information. As the search progresses, the techniques reveal how individual workers increase or decrease in the influence on the overall rostering solution's quality. Our method also helps identify workers with a lower impact on overall solution fitness and at what stage in the search these individuals can be considered highly flexible in their roster assignment.","PeriodicalId":422029,"journal":{"name":"Proceedings of the Companion Conference on Genetic and Evolutionary Computation","volume":"59 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-07-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"122627341","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}