page_title: Meta-optimization
section_title: Motivation
hierarchical_section_title: Meta-optimization / Motivation
caption_attribution_description: English: Performance landscape showing how basic Differential Evolution (DE) performs in aggregate on several benchmark problems when varying the two DE parameters NP and F, and keeping fixed CR=0.9. Lower meta-fitness values means better DE performance. Such a performance landscape is very time-consuming to compute, especially for optimizers with several behavioural parameters, but it can be searched efficiently using the simple meta-optimization approach by Pedersen implemented in SwarmOps to uncover DE parameters with good performance.
context_page_description: In numerical optimization, meta-optimization is the use of one optimization method to tune another optimization method. Meta-optimization is reported to have been used as early as in the late 1970s by Mercer and Sampson for finding optimal parameter settings of a genetic algorithm.
  Meta-optimization and related concepts are also known in the literature as meta-evolution, super-optimization, automated parameter calibration, hyper-heuristics, etc.
context_section_description: Optimization methods such as genetic algorithm and differential evolution have several parameters that govern their behaviour and efficiency in optimizing a given problem and these parameters must be chosen by the practitioner to achieve satisfactory results. Selecting the behavioural parameters by hand is a laborious task that is susceptible to human misconceptions of what makes the optimizer perform well.
  The behavioural parameters of an optimizer can be varied and the optimization performance plotted as a landscape. This is computationally feasible for optimizers with few behavioural parameters and optimization problems that are fast to compute, but when the number of behavioural parameters increases the time usage for computing such a performance landscape increases exponentially. This is the curse of dimensionality for the search-space consisting of an optimizer's behavioural parameters. An efficient method is therefore needed to search the space of behavioural parameters.
caption: Performance landscape for differential evolution.
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