MOEA Test Suites

Abstract

Why test MOEAs? To evaluate, compare, classify, and improve algorithm performance (effectiveness and efficiency)! What is an MOEA test? An MOP test function, an MOP test suite, pedagogical functions, or a real-world problem? How to find an appropriate MOEA test? MOEA literature, historical use, test generators, or well known real-world applications. When to test? Incremental algorithm and test development starting early or wait until end of development. How to design an MOEA test? Assumptions, computational platform selection, statistical tools, metric selection, experimental plan, and an on-going process. Therefore, considerable effort must be expended not only to define proper MOP tests and generate the proper design of MOEA experiments, but also to employ the honest selection of appropriate testing metrics and associated statistical evaluation and comparison. In this chapter, the development of various MOP test suites is addressed, and in the next chapter, their use in appropriate MOEA evaluations is discussed.

“When the mathematician says that such and such a proposition is true of one thing, it may be interesting, and it is surely safe. But when he tries to extend his proposition to everything, though it is much more interesting, it is also much more dangerous. In the transition from one to all, from the specific to the general, mathematics has made its greatest progress, and suffered its most serious setbacks, of which the logical paradoxes constitute the most important part.”

—E. Kasner and J. Newman, Mathematics and the Imagination