A New Algorithm for On-Line Handwriting Signature Verification Based on Evolutionary Computation

The paper proposes an on-line signature verification algorithm, through which test sample and template signatures can be optimizedly matched, based on evolutionary computation （EC）. Firstly, the similarity of signature curve segment is defined, and shift and scale transforms are also introduced due to the randoness of on-line signature. Secondly, this paper puts forward signature verification matching algorithm after establishment of the mathematical model. Thirdly, the concrete realization of the algorithm based on EC is discussed as well. In addition, the influence of shift and scale on the matching result is fully considered in the algorithm. Finally, a computation example is given, and the matching results between the test sample curve and the template signature curve are analyzed in detail, The preliminary experiments reveal that the type of signature verification problem can be solved by EC.

Using Evolutionary Computation to Solve Problems in Nonparametric Regression

This paper studies evolutionary mechanism of parameter selection in the construction of weight function for Nearest Neighbour Estimate in nonparametric regression. Construct an algorithm which adaptively evolves fine weight and makes good prediction about unknown points. The numerical experiments indicate that this method is effective. It is a meaningful discussion about practicability of nonparametric regression and methodology of adaptive model-building.

Evolutionary Computation Based Optimization of Image Zernike Moments Shape Feature Vector

The image shape feature can be described by the image Zernike moments. In this paper, we points out the problem that the high dimension image Zernike moments shape feature vector can describe more detail of the original image but has too many elements making trouble for the next image analysis phases. Then the low dimension image Zernike moments shape feature vector should be improved and optimized to describe more detail of the original image. So the optimization algorithm based on evolutionary computation is designed and implemented in this paper to solve this problem. The experimental results demonstrate the feasibility of the optimization algorithm.

Evolutionary Computation for Image Feature Extraction

Modifications to an image feature extraction approach involving evolutionary computation and autonomous agents are proposed. The described algorithm allows extraction of features with certain specified characteristics, while omitting other undesirable details in the image. Experimental results are presented with remarks.

Orbit Design for Responsive Space Using Multiple-objective Evolutionary Computation

Responsive orbits have exhibited advantages in emergencies for their excellent responsiveness and coverage to targets.Generally,there are several conflicting metrics to trade in the orbit design for responsive space.A special multiple-objective genetic algorithm,namely the Nondominated Sorting Genetic AlgorithmⅡ(NSGAⅡ),is used to design responsive orbits.This algorithm has considered the conflicting metrics of orbits to achieve the optimal solution,including the orbital elements and launch programs of responsive vehicles.Low-Earth fast access orbits and low-Earth repeat coverage orbits,two subtypes of responsive orbits,can be designed using NSGAI under given metric tradeoffs,number of vehicles,and launch mode.By selecting the optimal solution from the obtained Pareto fronts,a designer can process the metric tradeoffs conveniently in orbit design.Recurring to the flexibility of the algorithm,the NSGAI promotes the responsive orbit design further.

The Applications of Evolutionary Computation in Software Reliability

Software reliability models(SRMs) are the theoretic foundation of software reliability. However, the existence of intrinsic limitation of the preposition in traditional model building confines the applications of SRMs. In this paper, a new method,evolutionary computation,is used to estimate parameters of SRMs .At the same time, new algorithms are also proposed and employed to build SRMs. As the experiment results demonstrate, evolutionary computation method is po'verful and effective.

Modeling and Simulation for High Energy Sub-Nuclear Interactions Using Evolutionary Computation Technique

High energy sub-nuclear interactions are a good tool to dive deeply in the core of the particles to recognize their structures and the forces governed. The current article focuses on using one of the evolutionary computation techniques, the so-called genetic programming (GP), to model the hadron nucleus (h-A) interactions through discovering functions. In this article, GP is used to simulate the rapidity distribution of total charged, positive and negative pions for p--Ar and p--Xe interactions at 200 GeV/c and charged particles for p-pb collision at 5.02 TeV. We have done so many runs to select the best runs of the GP program and finally obtained the rapidity distribution as a function of the lab momentum , mass number (A) and the number of particles per unit solid angle (Y). In all cases studied, we compared our seven discovered functions produced by GP technique with the corresponding experimental data and the excellent matching was so clear.

Evolutionary Neural Architecture Search and Its Applications in Healthcare

Most of the neural network architectures are based on human experience,which requires a long and tedious trial-and-error process.Neural architecture search(NAS)attempts to detect effective architectures without human intervention.Evolutionary algorithms(EAs)for NAS can find better solutions than human-designed architectures by exploring a large search space for possible architectures.Using multiobjective EAs for NAS,optimal neural architectures that meet various performance criteria can be explored and discovered efficiently.Furthermore,hardware-accelerated NAS methods can improve the efficiency of the NAS.While existing reviews have mainly focused on different strategies to complete NAS,a few studies have explored the use of EAs for NAS.In this paper,we summarize and explore the use of EAs for NAS,as well as large-scale multiobjective optimization strategies and hardware-accelerated NAS methods.NAS performs well in healthcare applications,such as medical image analysis,classification of disease diagnosis,and health monitoring.EAs for NAS can automate the search process and optimize multiple objectives simultaneously in a given healthcare task.Deep neural network has been successfully used in healthcare,but it lacks interpretability.Medical data is highly sensitive,and privacy leaks are frequently reported in the healthcare industry.To solve these problems,in healthcare,we propose an interpretable neuroevolution framework based on federated learning to address search efficiency and privacy protection.Moreover,we also point out future research directions for evolutionary NAS.Overall,for researchers who want to use EAs to optimize NNs in healthcare,we analyze the advantages and disadvantages of doing so to provide detailed guidance,and propose an interpretable privacy-preserving framework for healthcare applications.

Recent Advances in Evolutionary Computation

Evolutionary computation has experienced a tremendous growth in the last decade in both theoretical analyses and industrial applications. Its scope has evolved beyond its original meaning of ＂biological evolution＂ toward a wide variety of nature inspired computational algorithms and techniques, including evolutionary, neural, ecological, social and economical computation, etc, in a unified framework. Many research topics in evolutionary computation nowadays are not necessarily ＂evolutionary＂. This paper provides an overview of some recent advances in evolutionary computation that have been made in CERCIA at the University of Birmingham, UK. It covers a wide range of topics in optimization, learning and design using evolutionary approaches and techniques, and theoretical results in the computational time complexity of evolutionary algorithms. Some issues related to future development of evolutionary computation are also discussed.

Evolutionary Computation for Large-scale Multi-objective Optimization: A Decade of Progresses

Large-scale multi-objective optimization problems(MOPs)that involve a large number of decision variables,have emerged from many real-world applications.While evolutionary algorithms(EAs)have been widely acknowledged as a mainstream method for MOPs,most research progress and successful applications of EAs have been restricted to MOPs with small-scale decision variables.More recently,it has been reported that traditional multi-objective EAs(MOEAs)suffer severe deterioration with the increase of decision variables.As a result,and motivated by the emergence of real-world large-scale MOPs,investigation of MOEAs in this aspect has attracted much more attention in the past decade.This paper reviews the progress of evolutionary computation for large-scale multi-objective optimization from two angles.From the key difficulties of the large-scale MOPs,the scalability analysis is discussed by focusing on the performance of existing MOEAs and the challenges induced by the increase of the number of decision variables.From the perspective of methodology,the large-scale MOEAs are categorized into three classes and introduced respectively:divide and conquer based,dimensionality reduction based and enhanced search-based approaches.Several future research directions are also discussed.

Evolutionary Computation for Expensive Optimization:A Survey

Expensive optimization problem(EOP) widely exists in various significant real-world applications. However, EOP requires expensive or even unaffordable costs for evaluating candidate solutions, which is expensive for the algorithm to find a satisfactory solution. Moreover, due to the fast-growing application demands in the economy and society, such as the emergence of the smart cities, the internet of things, and the big data era, solving EOP more efficiently has become increasingly essential in various fields, which poses great challenges on the problem-solving ability of optimization approach for EOP. Among various optimization approaches, evolutionary computation(EC) is a promising global optimization tool widely used for solving EOP efficiently in the past decades. Given the fruitful advancements of EC for EOP, it is essential to review these advancements in order to synthesize and give previous research experiences and references to aid the development of relevant research fields and real-world applications. Motivated by this, this paper aims to provide a comprehensive survey to show why and how EC can solve EOP efficiently. For this aim, this paper firstly analyzes the total optimization cost of EC in solving EOP. Then, based on the analysis, three promising research directions are pointed out for solving EOP, which are problem approximation and substitution, algorithm design and enhancement, and parallel and distributed computation. Note that, to the best of our knowledge, this paper is the first that outlines the possible directions for efficiently solving EOP by analyzing the total expensive cost. Based on this, existing works are reviewed comprehensively via a taxonomy with four parts, including the above three research directions and the real-world application part. Moreover, some future research directions are also discussed in this paper. It is believed that such a survey can attract attention, encourage discussions, and stimulate new EC research ideas for solving EOP and related real-world applications more efficiently.

Gait Optimization of a Quadruped Robot Using Evolutionary Computation

Evolutionary Computation(EC)has strengths in terms of computation for gait optimization.However,conventional evolutionary algorithms use typical gait parameters such as step length and swing height,which limit the trajectory deformation for optimization of the foot trajectory.Furthermore,the quantitative index of fitness convergence is insufficient.In this paper,we perform gait optimization of a quadruped robot using foot placement perturbation based on EC.The proposed algorithm has an atypical solution search range,which is generated by independent manipulation of each placement that forms the foot trajectory.A convergence index is also introduced to prevent premature cessation of learning.The conventional algorithm and the proposed algorithm are applied to a quadruped robot;walking performances are then compared by gait simulation.Although the two algorithms exhibit similar computation rates,the proposed algorithm shows better fitness and a wider search range.The evolutionary tendency of the walking trajectory is analyzed using the optimized results,and the findings provide insight into reliable leg trajectory design.

Evolutionary Computation in Social Propagation over Complex Networks: A Survey

Social propagation denotes the spread phenomena directly correlated to the human world and society, which includes but is not limited to the diffusion of human epidemics, human-made malicious viruses, fake news, social innovation, viral marketing, etc. Simulation and optimization are two major themes in social propagation, where network-based simulation helps to analyze and understand the social contagion, and problem-oriented optimization is devoted to contain or improve the infection results. Though there have been many models and optimization techniques, the matter of concern is that the increasing complexity and scales of propagation processes continuously refresh the former conclusions. Recently, evolutionary computation(EC) shows its potential in alleviating the concerns by introducing an evolving and developing perspective. With this insight, this paper intends to develop a comprehensive view of how EC takes effect in social propagation. Taxonomy is provided for classifying the propagation problems, and the applications of EC in solving these problems are reviewed. Furthermore, some open issues of social propagation and the potential applications of EC are discussed.This paper contributes to recognizing the problems in application-oriented EC design and paves the way for the development of evolving propagation dynamics.

Regularized machine learning through constraint swarm and evolutionary computation applied to regression problems

Purpose–The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate the applicability of swarm and evolutionary techniques for regularized machine learning.Generally,by defining a proper penalty function,regularization laws are embedded into the structure of common least square solutions to increase the numerical stability,sparsity,accuracy and robustness of regression weights.Several regularization techniques have been proposed so far which have their own advantages and disadvantages.Several efforts have been made to find fast and accurate deterministic solvers to handle those regularization techniques.However,the proposed numerical and deterministic approaches need certain knowledge of mathematical programming,and also do not guarantee the global optimality of the obtained solution.In this research,the authors propose the use of constraint swarm and evolutionary techniques to cope with demanding requirements of regularized extreme learning machine(ELM).Design/methodology/approach–To implement the required tools for comparative numerical study,three steps are taken.The considered algorithms contain both classical and swarm and evolutionary approaches.For the classical regularization techniques,Lasso regularization,Tikhonov regularization,cascade Lasso-Tikhonov regularization,and elastic net are considered.For swarm and evolutionary-based regularization,an efficient constraint handling technique known as self-adaptive penalty function constraint handling is considered,and its algorithmic structure is modified so that it can efficiently perform the regularized learning.Several well-known metaheuristics are considered to check the generalization capability of the proposed scheme.To test the efficacy of the proposed constraint evolutionary-based regularization technique,a wide range of regression problems are used.Besides,the proposed framework is applied to a real-life identification problem,i.e.identifying the dominant factors affecting the hydrocarbon emissions of an automotive engine,for further assurance on the performance of the proposed scheme.Findings–Through extensive numerical study,it is observed that the proposed scheme can be easily used for regularized machine learning.It is indicated that by defining a proper objective function and considering an appropriate penalty function,near global optimum values of regressors can be easily obtained.The results attest the high potentials of swarm and evolutionary techniques for fast,accurate and robust regularized machine learning.Originality/value–The originality of the research paper lies behind the use of a novel constraint metaheuristic computing scheme which can be used for effective regularized optimally pruned extreme learning machine(OP-ELM).The self-adaption of the proposed method alleviates the user from the knowledge of the underlying system,and also increases the degree of the automation of OP-ELM.Besides,by using different types of metaheuristics,it is demonstrated that the proposed methodology is a general flexible scheme,and can be combined with different types of swarm and evolutionary-based optimization techniques to form a regularized machine learning approach.

A Fast Clustering Based Evolutionary Algorithm for Super-Large-Scale Sparse Multi-Objective Optimization

During the last three decades,evolutionary algorithms(EAs)have shown superiority in solving complex optimization problems,especially those with multiple objectives and non-differentiable landscapes.However,due to the stochastic search strategies,the performance of most EAs deteriorates drastically when handling a large number of decision variables.To tackle the curse of dimensionality,this work proposes an efficient EA for solving super-large-scale multi-objective optimization problems with sparse optimal solutions.The proposed algorithm estimates the sparse distribution of optimal solutions by optimizing a binary vector for each solution,and provides a fast clustering method to highly reduce the dimensionality of the search space.More importantly,all the operations related to the decision variables only contain several matrix calculations,which can be directly accelerated by GPUs.While existing EAs are capable of handling fewer than 10000 real variables,the proposed algorithm is verified to be effective in handling 1000000 real variables.Furthermore,since the proposed algorithm handles the large number of variables via accelerated matrix calculations,its runtime can be reduced to less than 10%of the runtime of existing EAs.

Evolutionary Multi-objective Portfolio Optimization in Practical Context

This paper addresses evolutionary multi-objective portfolio optimization in the practical context by incorporating realistic constraints into the problem model and preference criterion into the optimization search process. The former is essential to enhance the realism of the classical mean-variance model proposed by Harry Markowitz, since portfolio managers often face a number of realistic constraints arising from business and industry regulations, while the latter reflects the fact that portfolio managers are ultimately interested in specific regions or points along the efficient frontier during the actual execution of their investment orders. For the former, this paper proposes an order-based representation that can be easily extended to handle various realistic constraints like floor and ceiling constraints and cardinality constraint. An experimental study, based on benchmark problems obtained from the OR-library, demonstrates its capability to attain a better approximation of the efficient frontier in terms of proximity and diversity with respect to other conventional representations. The experimental results also illustrated its viability and practicality in handling the various realistic constraints. A simple strategy to incorporate preferences into the multi-objective optimization process is highlighted and the experimental study demonstrates its capability in driving the evolutionary search towards specific regions of the efficient frontier.

Time Complexity of Evolutionary Algorithms for Combinatorial Optimization:A Decade of Results

Computational time complexity analyzes of evolutionary algorithms （EAs） have been performed since the mid-nineties. The first results were related to very simple algorithms, such as the （1＋1）-EA, on toy problems. These efforts produced a deeper understanding of how EAs perform on different kinds of fitness landscapes and general mathematical tools that may be extended to the analysis of more complicated EAs on more realistic problems. In fact, in recent years, it has been possible to analyze the （1＋1）-EA on combinatorial optimization problems with practical applications and more realistic population-based EAs on structured toy problems. This paper presents a survey of the results obtained in the last decade along these two research lines. The most common mathematical techniques are introduced, the basic ideas behind them are discussed and their elective applications are highlighted. Solved problems that were still open are enumerated as are those still awaiting for a solution. New questions and problems arisen in the meantime are also considered.

Integrating Conjugate Gradients Into Evolutionary Algorithms for Large-Scale Continuous Multi-Objective Optimization

Large-scale multi-objective optimization problems(LSMOPs)pose challenges to existing optimizers since a set of well-converged and diverse solutions should be found in huge search spaces.While evolutionary algorithms are good at solving small-scale multi-objective optimization problems,they are criticized for low efficiency in converging to the optimums of LSMOPs.By contrast,mathematical programming methods offer fast convergence speed on large-scale single-objective optimization problems,but they have difficulties in finding diverse solutions for LSMOPs.Currently,how to integrate evolutionary algorithms with mathematical programming methods to solve LSMOPs remains unexplored.In this paper,a hybrid algorithm is tailored for LSMOPs by coupling differential evolution and a conjugate gradient method.On the one hand,conjugate gradients and differential evolution are used to update different decision variables of a set of solutions,where the former drives the solutions to quickly converge towards the Pareto front and the latter promotes the diversity of the solutions to cover the whole Pareto front.On the other hand,objective decomposition strategy of evolutionary multi-objective optimization is used to differentiate the conjugate gradients of solutions,and the line search strategy of mathematical programming is used to ensure the higher quality of each offspring than its parent.In comparison with state-of-the-art evolutionary algorithms,mathematical programming methods,and hybrid algorithms,the proposed algorithm exhibits better convergence and diversity performance on a variety of benchmark and real-world LSMOPs.

An evolutionary adaptive neuro-fuzzy inference system for estimating field penetration index of tunnel boring machine in rock mass

Field penetration index(FPI) is one of the representative key parameters to examine the tunnel boring machine(TBM) performance.Lack of accurate FPI prediction can be responsible for numerous disastrous incidents associated with rock mechanics and engineering.This study aims to predict TBM performance(i.e.FPI) by an efficient and improved adaptive neuro-fuzzy inference system(ANFIS) model.This was done using an evolutionary algorithm,i.e.artificial bee colony(ABC) algorithm mixed with the ANFIS model.The role of ABC algorithm in this system is to find the optimum membership functions(MFs) of ANFIS model to achieve a higher degree of accuracy.The procedure and modeling were conducted on a tunnelling database comprising of more than 150 data samples where brittleness index(BI),fracture spacing,α angle between the plane of weakness and the TBM driven direction,and field single cutter load were assigned as model inputs to approximate FPI values.According to the results obtained by performance indices,the proposed ANFISABC model was able to receive the highest accuracy level in predicting FPI values compared with ANFIS model.In terms of coefficient of determination(R^(2)),the values of 0.951 and 0.901 were obtained for training and testing stages of the proposed ANFISABC model,respectively,which confirm its power and capability in solving TBM performance problem.The proposed model can be used in the other areas of rock mechanics and underground space technologies with similar conditions.

An Evolutionary Approach to the Delineation of Functional Areas Based on Travel-to-work Flows

This paper presents a new approach to the delineation of local labor markets based on evolutionary computation. The aim of the exercise is the division of a given territory into functional regions based on travel-to-work flows. Such regions are defined so that a high degree of inter-regional separation and of intra-regional integration in both cases in terms of commuting flows is guaranteed. Additional requirements include the absence of overlap between delineated regions and the exhaustive coverage of the whole territory. The procedure is based on the maximization of a fitness function that measures aggregate intra-region interaction under constraints of inter-region separation and minimum size. In the experimentation stage, two variations of the fitness function are used, and the process is also applied as a final stage for the optimization of the results from one of the most successful existing methods, which are used by the British authorities for the delineation of travel-to-work areas （TTWAs）. The empirical exercise is conducted using real data for a sufficiently large territory that is considered to be representative given the density and variety of travel-to-work patterns that it embraces. The paper includes the quantitative comparison with alternative traditional methods, the assessment of the performance of the set of operators which has been specifically designed to handle the regionalization problem and the evaluation of the convergence process. The robustness of the solutions, something crucial in a research and policy-making context, is also discussed in the paper.