PROGRESS: Progressive reinforcement-learning-based surrogate selection

Abstract

In most engineering problems, experiments for evaluating the performance of different setups are time consuming, expensive, or even both. Therefore, sequential experimental designs have become an indispensable technique for optimizing the objective functions of these problems. In this context, most of the problems can be considered as a black-box. Specifically, no function properties are known a priori to select the best suited surrogate model class. Therefore, we propose a new ensemble-based approach, which is capable of identifying the best surrogate model during the optimization process by using reinforcement learning techniques. The procedure is general and can be applied to arbitrary ensembles of surrogate models. Results are provided on 24 well-known black-box functions to show that the progressive procedure is capable of selecting suitable models from the ensemble and that it can compete with state-of-the-art methods for sequential optimization. © 2013 Springer-Verlag.