Dr. Swagatam Das
Title: Evaluating the Swarm Metaphor based Heuristics for Continuous Optimization - Modern Performance Measures and the (Non-parametric) Statistical Perspectives
Dr. Swagatam Das (Electronics and Communication Sciences Unit of the Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata, India.)
Abstract
Numerous metaheuristics have been proposed based on the life supporting activity of the swarming creatures in nature for solving optimization problems involving continuous search spaces. However, whether these algorithms will survive in the long run or whether their names will remain stipulated within the world of paper writing - this issue largely depends on the ease of implementation and efficiency in solving practical optimization problems. Most of the pioneering papers on swarm intelligence based metaheuristics generally exhibit the efficiency of the algorithm on a set of synthetic benchmark functions which are supposed to capture the different aspects of the real world optimization problems. This talk will focus on the benchmarking procedures adopted for comparing different metaheuristics meaningfully. The talk will elaborate on modern performance measures, design of experiments and provide some guidelines for selecting the suitable metaheuristic for solving a domain-specific problem. It will also discuss some recent non-parametric hypothesis test procedures to evaluate the comparative results. Finally some shortcomings of the modern statistical benchmarking procedures will be highlighted along with the discussion on some important future research directions.
Biography
Swagatam Das is currently serving as a faculty member at the Electronics and Communication Sciences Unit of the Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata, India. His research interests include non-convex optimization and machine learning. Dr. Das has published one research monograph, one edited volume, and more than 300 research articles in peer-reviewed journals and international conferences. He is the founding co-editor-in-chief of Swarm and Evolutionary Computation, an international journal from Elsevier. He has also served as or is serving as the associate editors of several international journals of repute from IEEE, Elsevier and Springer. Dr. Das has 12000+ Google Scholar citations and an H-index of 54 till date. He has been associated with the international program committees and organizing committees of several regular international conferences including IEEE CEC, IEEE SSCI, and GECCO. He has acted as guest editors for special issues in journals like IEEE Transactions on Evolutionary Computation and IEEE Transactions on SMC, Part C. He is the recipient of the 2012 Young Engineer Award from the Indian National Academy of ngineering (INAE). He is also the recipient of the 2015 Thomson Reuters Research Excellence India Citation Award as the highest cited researcher from India in Engineering and Computer Science category between 2010 to 2014.
