A Two-Layer Encoding Learning Swarm Optimizer Based on Frequent Itemsets for Sparse Large-Scale Multi-Objective Optimization

Traditional large-scale multi-objective optimization algorithms (LSMOEAs) encounter difficulties when dealing with sparse large-scale multi-objective optimization problems (SLM-OPs) where most decision variables are zero. As a result, many algorithms use a two-layer encoding approach to optimize binary variable Mask and real variable Dec separately. Nevertheless, existing optimizers often focus on locating non-zero variable positions to optimize the binary variables Mask. However, approximating the sparse distribution of real Pareto optimal solutions does not necessarily mean that the objective function is optimized. In data mining, it is common to mine frequent itemsets appearing together in a dataset to reveal the correlation between data. Inspired by this, we propose a novel two-layer encoding learning swarm optimizer based on frequent itemsets (TELSO) to address these SLMOPs. TELSO mined the frequent terms of multiple particles with better target values to find mask combinations that can obtain better objective values for fast convergence. Experimental results on five real-world problems and eight benchmark sets demonstrate that TELSO outperforms existing state-of-the-art sparse large-scale multi-objective evolutionary algorithms (SLMOEAs) in terms of performance and convergence speed.