A global surrogate assisted CMA-ES

ABSTRACTWe explore the arguably simplest way to build an effective surrogate fitness model in continuous search spaces. The model complexity is linear or diagonal-quadratic or full quadratic, depending on the number of available data. The model parameters are computed from the Moore-Penrose pseudoinverse. The model is used as a surrogate fitness for CMA-ES if the rank correlation between true fitness and surrogate value of recently sampled data points is high. Otherwise, further samples from the current population are successively added as data to the model. We empirically compare the IPOP scheme of the new model assisted lq-CMA-ES with a variety of previously proposed methods and with a simple portfolio algorithm using SLSQP and CMA-ES. We conclude that a global quadratic model and a simple portfolio algorithm are viable options to enhance CMA-ES. The model building code is available as part of the pycma Python module on Github and PyPI.