Abstract-It is commonly accepted that Pareto-based evolutionary multiobjective optimization (EMO) algorithms encounter difficulties in dealing with many-objective problems. In these algorithms, the ineffectiveness of the Pareto dominance relation for a high-dimensional space leads diversity maintenance mechanisms to play the leading role during the evolutionary process, while the preference of diversity maintenance mechanisms for individuals in sparse regions results in the final solutions distributed widely over the objective space but distant from the desired Pareto front. Intuitively, there are two ways to address this problem: 1) modifying the Pareto dominance relation and 2) modifying the diversity maintenance mechanism in the algorithm. In this paper, we focus on the latter and propose a shift-based density estimation (SDE) strategy. The aim of our study is to develop a general modification of density estimation in order to make Pareto-based algorithms suitable for many-objective optimization. In contrast to traditional density estimation that only involves the distribution of individuals in the population, SDE covers both the distribution and convergence information of individuals. The application of SDE in three popular Paretobased algorithms demonstrates its usefulness in handling manyobjective problems. Moreover, an extensive comparison with five state-of-the-art EMO algorithms reveals its competitiveness in balancing convergence and diversity of solutions. These findings not only show that SDE is a good alternative to tackle manyobjective problems, but also present a general extension of Paretobased algorithms in many-objective optimization. Index Terms-Convergence, diversity, evolutionary multiobjective optimization, many-objective optimization, shift-based density estimation.
For example, the shift-based density estimation (SDE) strategy REF covers both convergence and diversity information of individuals in the selection process.
Shift-Based Density Estimation for Pareto-Based Algorithms in Many-Objective Optimization
IEEE Transactions on Evolutionary Computation
IEEE Transactions on Evolutionary Computation
Computer Science Mathematics