How many local optima?


Sponsor Prof. Craig Tovey
ctovey@isye.isye.gatech.edu
Area Theory

Problem
I want to find out how many local optima a problem tends to have. I have code (in C) that could be used to find a local optimum and I have data for several test cases. The problem is to figure out how to use the above to estimate the number of local optima. The student will have to know some probability theory, and a little statistics wouldn't hurt either. It will also take a little programming --probably a control module and a data collection module that keeps a hash table with frequency counts. Step 1: work with me and figure out a reasonable method to estimate the number of optima. Step 2: Put the code together. Step 3: run it on the test data and use the method from step 1 to estimate the number of optima.


updated by tucker, 9/7/97, 5:45pm.