Black Box Optimization Machine Learning And No Free Lunch Theorems

This edited volume illustrates the connections between machine learning techniques, black box optimization, and no-free lunch theorems. Each of the thirteen contributions focuses on the commonality and interdisciplinary concepts as well as the fundamentals needed to fully comprehend the impact of individual applications and problems. Current theoretical, algorithmic, and practical methods used are provided to stimulate a new effort towards innovative and efficient solutions. The book is intended for beginners who wish to achieve a broad overview of optimization methods and also for more experienced researchers as well as researchers in mathematics, optimization, operations research, quantitative logistics, data analysis, and statistics, who will benefit from access to a quick reference to key topics and methods. The coverage ranges from mathematically rigorous methods to heuristic and evolutionary approaches in an attempt to equip the reader with different viewpoints of the same problem.

Optimization happens everywhere. Machine learning is one example of such and gradient descent is probably the most famous algorithm for performing optimization. Optimization means to find the best value of some function or model. That can be the maximum or the minimum according to some metric. Using clear explanations, standard Python libraries, and step-by-step tutorial lessons, you will learn how to find the optimum point to numerical functions confidently using modern optimization algorithms.

Researchers and practitioners in computer science, optimization, operations research and mathematics will find this book useful as it illustrates optimization models and solution methods in discrete, non-differentiable, stochastic, and nonlinear optimization. Contributions from experts in optimization are showcased in this book showcase a broad range of applications and topics detailed in this volume, including pattern and image recognition, computer vision, robust network design, and process control in nonlinear distributed systems. This book is dedicated to the 80th birthday of Ivan V. Sergienko, who is a member of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) of Ukraine and the director of the V.M. Glushkov Institute of Cybernetics. His work has had a significant impact on several theoretical and applied aspects of discrete optimization, computational mathematics, systems analysis and mathematical modeling.

This two-volume set, LNCS 12565 and 12566, constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Machine Learning, Optimization, and Data Science, LOD 2020, held in Siena, Italy, in July 2020. The total of 116 full papers presented in this two-volume post-conference proceedings set was carefully reviewed and selected from 209 submissions. These research articles were written by leading scientists in the fields of machine learning, artificial intelligence, reinforcement learning, computational optimization, and data science presenting a substantial array of ideas, technologies, algorithms, methods, and applications.

This book reviews the state-of-the-art developments in nature-inspired algorithms and their applications in various disciplines, ranging from feature selection and engineering design optimization to scheduling and vehicle routing. It introduces each algorithm and its implementation with case studies as well as extensive literature reviews, and also includes self-contained chapters featuring theoretical analyses, such as convergence analysis and no-free-lunch theorems so as to provide insights into the current nature-inspired optimization algorithms. Topics include ant colony optimization, the bat algorithm, B-spline curve fitting, cuckoo search, feature selection, economic load dispatch, the firefly algorithm, the flower pollination algorithm, knapsack problem, octonian and quaternion representations, particle swarm optimization, scheduling, wireless networks, vehicle routing with time windows, and maximally different alternatives. This timely book serves as a practical guide and reference resource for students, researchers and professionals.

This book examines the mismatch between discrete programs, which lie at the center of modern applied mathematics, and the continuous space phenomena they simulate. The author considers whether we can imagine continuous spaces of programs, and asks what the structure of such spaces would be and how they would be constituted. He proposes a functional analysis of program spaces focused through the lens of iterative optimization. The author begins with the observation that optimization methods such as Genetic Algorithms, Evolution Strategies, and Particle Swarm Optimization can be analyzed as Estimation of Distributions Algorithms (EDAs) in that they can be formulated as conditional probability distributions. The probabilities themselves are mathematical objects that can be compared and operated on, and thus many methods in Evolutionary Computation can be placed in a shared vector space and analyzed using techniques of functional analysis. The core ideas of this book expand from that concept, eventually incorporating all iterative stochastic search methods, including gradient-based methods. Inspired by work on Randomized Search Heuristics, the author covers all iterative optimization methods and not just evolutionary methods. The No Free Lunch Theorem is viewed as a useful introduction to the broader field of analysis that comes from developing a shared mathematical space for optimization algorithms. The author brings in intuitions from several branches of mathematics such as topology, probability theory, and stochastic processes and provides substantial background material to make the work as self-contained as possible. The book will be valuable for researchers in the areas of global optimization, machine learning, evolutionary theory, and control theory.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Parallel Computational Technologies, PCT 2022, held in Dubna, Russia, during March 29–31, 2022. The 22 full papers included in this book were carefully reviewed and selected from 60 submissions. They were organized in topical sections as follows: high performance architectures, tools and technologies; parallel numerical algorithms; supercomputer simulation.