Progressively adding objectives
Luis Martí, Fansi-Tchango Arsene, Laurent Navarro, Marc Schoenauer · Proceedings of the Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference · 2017
One of the principles of evolutionary multi-objective optimization is the conjoint optimization of the objective functions. However, in some cases, some of the objectives are easier to attain than others. This causes the population to lose diversity at a high rate and stagnate in early stages of the evolution. This paper presents the progressive addition of objectives (PAO) heuristic. PAO gradually adds objectives to a given problem relying on a perceived measure of complexity. This diversity loss phenomenon caused by the nature of a given objective has been observed when applying the Voronoi diagram-based evolutionary algorithm (VorEAl) in anomaly detection problems. Consequently, PAO has been first directed to address that issue. The experimental studies carried out show that the PAO heuristic manages to yield better results than the direct use of VorEAl on a group of test problems.