This book introduces numerous algorithmic hybridizations between both worlds that show how machine learning can improve and support evolution strategies. The set of methods comprises covariance matrix estimation, meta-modeling of fitness and constraint functions, dimensionality reduction for search and visualization of high-dimensional optimization processes, and clustering-based niching. After giving an introduction to evolution strategies and machine learning, the book builds the bridge between both worlds with an algorithmic and experimental perspective. Experiments mostly employ a (1+1)-ES and are implemented in Python using the machine learning library scikit-learn. The examples are conducted on typical benchmark problems illustrating algorithmic concepts and their experimental behavior. The book closes with a discussion of related lines of research.

This book introduces readers to genetic algorithms (GAs) with an emphasis on making the concepts, algorithms, and applications discussed as easy to understand as possible. Further, it avoids a great deal of formalisms and thus opens the subject to a broader audience in comparison to manuscripts overloaded by notations and equations. The book is divided into three parts, the first of which provides an introduction to GAs, starting with basic concepts like evolutionary operators and continuing with an overview of strategies for tuning and controlling parameters. In turn, the second part focuses on solution space variants like multimodal, constrained, and multi-objective solution spaces. Lastly, the third part briefly introduces theoretical tools for GAs, the intersections and hybridizations with machine learning, and highlights selected promising applications.

Evolutionary algorithms are successful biologically inspired meta-heuristics. Their success depends on adequate parameter settings. The question arises: how can evolutionary algorithms learn parameters automatically during the optimization? Evolution strategies gave an answer decades ago: self-adaptation. Their self-adaptive mutation control turned out to be exceptionally successful. But nevertheless self-adaptation has not achieved the attention it deserves.

This book introduces various types of self-adaptive parameters for evolutionary computation. Biased mutation for evolution strategies is useful for constrained search spaces. Self-adaptive inversion mutation accelerates the search on combinatorial TSP-like problems. After the analysis of self-adaptive crossover operators the book concentrates on premature convergence of self-adaptive mutation control at the constraint boundary. Besides extensive experiments, statistical tests and some theoretical investigations enrich the analysis of the proposed concepts.

This book is devoted to a novel approach for dimensionality reduction based on the famous nearest neighbor method that is a powerful classification and regression approach. It starts with an introduction to machine learning concepts and a real-world application from the energy domain. Then, unsupervised nearest neighbors (UNN) is introduced as efficient iterative method for dimensionality reduction. Various UNN models are developed step by step, reaching from a simple iterative strategy for discrete latent spaces to a stochastic kernel-based algorithm for learning submanifolds with independent parameterizations. Extensions that allow the embedding of incomplete and noisy patterns are introduced. Various optimization approaches are compared, from evolutionary to swarm-based heuristics. Experimental comparisons to related methodologies taking into account artificial test data sets and also real-world data demonstrate the behavior of UNN in practical scenarios. The book contains numerous color figures to illustrate the introduced concepts and to highlight the experimental results.

This book introduces readers to genetic algorithms (GAs) with an emphasis on making the concepts, algorithms, and applications discussed as easy to understand as possible. Further, it avoids a great deal of formalisms and thus opens the subject to a broader audience in comparison to manuscripts overloaded by notations and equations. The book is divided into three parts, the first of which provides an introduction to GAs, starting with basic concepts like evolutionary operators and continuing with an overview of strategies for tuning and controlling parameters. In turn, the second part focuses on solution space variants like multimodal, constrained, and multi-objective solution spaces. Lastly, the third part briefly introduces theoretical tools for GAs, the intersections and hybridizations with machine learning, and highlights selected promising applications.

This book introduces numerous algorithmic hybridizations between both worlds that show how machine learning can improve and support evolution strategies. The set of methods comprises covariance matrix estimation, meta-modeling of fitness and constraint functions, dimensionality reduction for search and visualization of high-dimensional optimization processes, and clustering-based niching. After giving an introduction to evolution strategies and machine learning, the book builds the bridge between both worlds with an algorithmic and experimental perspective. Experiments mostly employ a (1+1)-ES and are implemented in Python using the machine learning library scikit-learn. The examples are conducted on typical benchmark problems illustrating algorithmic concepts and their experimental behavior. The book closes with a discussion of related lines of research.

This book constitutes revised selected papers from the 5th ECML PKDD Workshop on Data Analytics for Renewable Energy Integration, DARE 2017, held in Skopje, Macedonia, in September 2017. The 11 papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected for inclusion in this book and handle topics such as time series forecasting, the detection of faults, cyber security, smart grid and smart cities, technology integration, demand response and many others.

This book is devoted to a novel approach for dimensionality reduction based on the famous nearest neighbor method that is a powerful classification and regression approach. It starts with an introduction to machine learning concepts and a real-world application from the energy domain. Then, unsupervised nearest neighbors (UNN) is introduced as efficient iterative method for dimensionality reduction. Various UNN models are developed step by step, reaching from a simple iterative strategy for discrete latent spaces to a stochastic kernel-based algorithm for learning submanifolds with independent parameterizations. Extensions that allow the embedding of incomplete and noisy patterns are introduced. Various optimization approaches are compared, from evolutionary to swarm-based heuristics. Experimental comparisons to related methodologies taking into account artificial test data sets and also real-world data demonstrate the behavior of UNN in practical scenarios. The book contains numerous color figures to illustrate the introduced concepts and to highlight the experimental results.  

Practical optimization problems are often hard to solve, in particular when they are black boxes and no further information about the problem is available except via function evaluations. This work introduces a collection of heuristics and algorithms for black box optimization with evolutionary algorithms in continuous solution spaces. The book gives an introduction to evolution strategies and parameter control. Heuristic extensions are presented that allow optimization in constrained, multimodal and multi-objective solution spaces. An adaptive penalty function is introduced for constrained optimization. Meta-models reduce the number of fitness and constraint function calls in expensive optimization problems. The hybridization of evolution strategies with local search allows fast optimization in solution spaces with many local optima. A selection operator based on reference lines in objective space is introduced to optimize multiple conflictive objectives. Evolutionary search is employed for learning kernel parameters of the Nadaraya-Watson estimator and a swarm-based iterative approach is presented for optimizing latent points in dimensionality reduction problems. Experiments on typical benchmark problems as well as numerous figures and diagrams illustrate the behavior of the introduced concepts and methods.

Evolutionary algorithms are successful biologically inspired meta-heuristics. Their success depends on adequate parameter settings. The question arises: how can evolutionary algorithms learn parameters automatically during the optimization? Evolution strategies gave an answer decades ago: self-adaptation. Their self-adaptive mutation control turned out to be exceptionally successful. But nevertheless self-adaptation has not achieved the attention it deserves. This book introduces various types of self-adaptive parameters for evolutionary computation. Biased mutation for evolution strategies is useful for constrained search spaces. Self-adaptive inversion mutation accelerates the search on combinatorial TSP-like problems. After the analysis of self-adaptive crossover operators the book concentrates on premature convergence of self-adaptive mutation control at the constraint boundary. Besides extensive experiments, statistical tests and some theoretical investigations enrich the analysis of the proposed concepts.

This book constitutes revised selected papers from the 4th ECML PKDD Workshop on Data Analytics for Renewable Energy Integration, DARE 2016, held in Riva del Garda, Italy, in September 2016. The 11 papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected for inclusion in this book and handle topics such as time series forecasting, the detection of faults, cyber security, smart grid and smart cities, technology integration, demand response and many others.

Computational Intelligence (CI) bezeichnet ein Teilgebiet der Kunstlichen Intelligenz, das biologische inspirierte Modelle algorithmisch umsetzt. Evolutionare Algorithmen orientieren sich an der darwinistischen Evolution und suchen mit Hilfe von Crossover, Mutation und Selektion eine optimale Loesung. Die Fuzzy-Logik ermoeglicht als unscharfe Logik eine kognitive Modellierung von Wissen und Inferenzprozessen. Neuronale Netze imitieren funktionale Aspekte des Gehirns fur Aufgaben wie Klassifikation und Mustererkennung. Neuere Ansatze der CI wie Reinforcement Learning ermoeglichen, das Verhalten kunstlicher Agenten in unbekannten Umgebungen zu steuern. Die Schwarmintelligenz modelliert Algorithmen, die auf Basis vieler einfacher Komponenten intelligente Leistungen vollfuhren. Zu guter Letzt loesen kunstliche Immunsysteme eine Reihe von Problemen, ahnlich wie ihr biologisches Pendant. Ein kompakter und ubersichtlicher mit vielen Beispielen gespickter Einstieg in die verschiedenen Verfahren der CI.

"Matzoh Ball Soup" is a distinctive collection of personal stories, poems, and rabbinical sermons that inspires the Jewish spirit. This collaboration of many impressive figures has resulted in a heartfelt and poignant anthology that is rich in both quality and content. The selections in "Matzoh Ball Soup" have been collected as a way to help individuals understand many of life's important lessons through the Jewish perspective. The writings are divided into eight chapters that are based on identifiable Jewish topics such as Shabbat, Hanukkah, Family, High Holidays, and others. Individually, these stories evoke strong emotion; collectively, they maintain the common thread of an uplifting and positive spirit. These accounts speak to people of all ages, and allow the reader to gain a new understanding of Jewish heritage, culture and spirituality. Ultimately, "Matzoh Ball Soup" is about people living life, and enduring through all that life has to offer.