COCO: Performance Assessment

We present an any-time performance assessment for benchmarking numerical optimization algorithms in a black-box scenario, applied within the COCO benchmarking platform. The performance assessment is based on runtimes measured in number of objective function evaluations to reach one or several quality indicator target values. We argue that runtime is the only available measure with a generic, meaningful, and quantitative interpretation. We discuss the choice of the target values, runlength-based targets, and the aggregation of results by using simulated restarts, averages, and empirical distribution functions.

Biobjective Performance Assessment with the COCO Platform

This document details the rationales behind assessing the performance of numerical black-box optimizers on multi-objective problems within the COCO platform and in particular on the biobjective test suite bbob-biobj. The evaluation is based on a hypervolume of all non-dominated solutions in the archive of candidate solutions and measures the runtime until the hypervolume value succeeds prescribed target values.