Multi-objective optimization with diversity preserving mixture-based iterated density estimation evolutionary algorithms Original Research Article

Stochastic optimization by learning and using probabilistic models has received an increasing amount of attention over the last few years. Algorithms within this field estimate the probability distribution of a selection of the available solutions and subsequently draw more samples from the estimated probability distribution. The resulting algorithms have displayed a good performance on a wide variety of single-objective optimization problems, both for binary as well as for real-valued variables. Mixture distributions offer a powerful tool for modeling complicated dependencies between the problem variables. Moreover, they allow for elegant and parallel exploration of a multi-objective front. This parallel exploration aids the important preservation of diversity in multi-objective optimization. In this paper, we propose a new algorithm for evolutionary multi-objective optimization by learning and using probabilistic mixture distributions. We name this algorithm Multi-objective Mixture-based Iterated Density Estimation Evolutionary Algorithm (MIDEA). To further improve and maintain the diversity that is obtained by the mixture distribution, we use a specialized diversity preserving selection operator. We verify the effectiveness of our approach in two different problem domains and compare it with two other well-known efficient multi-objective evolutionary algorithms.