In this paper, we rely on previous work proposing a modularized version of CMA-ES, which captures several alterations to the conventional CMA-ES developed in recent years. Each alteration provides significant advantages under certain problem properties, e.g., multi-modality, high conditioning. These distinct advancements are implemented as modules which result in 4 608 unique versions of CMA-ES. Previous findings illustrate the competitive advantage of enabling and disabling the aforementioned modules for different optimization problems. Yet, this modular CMA-ES is lacking a method to automatically determine when the activation of specific modules is auspicious and when it is not. We propose a well-performing instancespecific algorithm configuration model which selects an (almost) optimal configuration of modules for a given problem instance. In addition, the structure of this configuration model is able to capture inter-dependencies between modules, e.g., two (or more) modules might only be advantageous in unison for some problem types, making the orchestration of modules a crucial task. This is accomplished by chaining multiple random forest classifiers together into a so-called Classifier Chain based on a set of numerical features extracted by means of Exploratory Landscape Analysis (ELA) to describe the given problem instances.
The herein proposed Python package pflacco provides a set of numerical features to characterize single-objective continuous and constrained optimization problems. Thereby, pflacco addresses two major challenges in the area optimization. Firstly, it provides the means to develop an understanding of a given problem instance, which is crucial for designing, selecting, or configuring optimization algorithms in general. Secondly, these numerical features can be utilized in the research streams of automated algorithm selection and configuration. While the majority of these landscape features is already available in the R package flacco, our Python implementation offers these tools to an even wider audience and thereby promotes research interests and novel avenues in the area of optimization.
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