Efficient Neuroevolution Using Island Repopulation and Simplex Hyperparameter Optimization.

Recent studies have shown that the performance of evolutionary neural architecture search (i.e., neuroevolution) algorithms can be significantly improved by the use of island based strategies which periodically experience extinction and repopulation events. Further, it has been shown that the simplex hyperparameter optimization (SHO) method can also improve neuroevolution (NE) performance by optimizing neural network training hyperparameters while the NE algorithm also trains and designs neural networks. This work provides an extensive examination of combining island repopulation events with five different island-based variations of SHO. These methods are evaluated for the evolution of recurrent neural networks for the challenging problem of multivariate time series forecasting on two real world datasets. We show with statistical significance that adding repopulation to the SHO variants in almost every case improves performance, and for those that does there is no statistical difference. In addition, we find that one variant in particular, multi-island, random island best genome (MIRIB) performs the best across all experiment types.