Session details: BBOB'15 Workshop

Abstract

Welcome to the GECCO 2015 Black-Box Optimization Benchmarking workshop (BBOB 2015)! This workshop is a follow up of the BBOB workshops at GECCO 2009 in Montreal, at GECCO 2010 in Portland, at GECCO 2012 in Philadelphia and at GECCO 2013 in Amsterdam as well as of the BBOB special session at CEC 2015. The workshop focuses on benchmarking continuous optimizers-a crucial task to assess performance of optimizers quantitatively, understand weaknesses and strengths of each algorithm, and a compulsory path to evaluate new algorithm designs. Because this task is tedious and difficult to realize, we have furnished to the participants: the choice and implementation of two well-motivated single-objective benchmark function testbeds for noiseless and noisy optimization, the design of an experimental set-up, the generation of data output, and the post-processing and presentation of the results in graphs and tables. Over the years, the BBOB workshop has allowed to establish a standard for benchmarking continuous optimizers. The code for running experiments and for post-processing data as well as the collected data are made available on the website http://coco.gforge.inria.fr/. Like in previous years, the post-processing code allowed a focus towards expensive optimization where only a small budget of function evaluations is affordable.