Implement Discrete PSO Variants

Hi! Thank you for checking out this issue!

Currently, this whole part is pretty much open. As of now, I’m planning to give PySwarms four major optimization capabilities:

• single-objective continuous optimization
• single-objective discrete optimization
• multi-objective optimization, and
• constrained optimization.

We’ve established some grounds on single-objective continuous optimization (with the standard implementations of global-best and local-best PSO). But we haven’t done anything yet as for discrete optimization. Would you like to give us a headstart?

These are the steps that will be undertaken to close this issue:

1. Creating an abstract class in the pyswarms.base module. This will provide a skeleton on how other implementations of the same optimization nature would be written. Take for example how global-best (pyswarms.single.gbest) and local-best (pyswarms.single.lbest) are inheriting from the class SwarmBase (this is the abstract class for single-objective continuous).

2. Implementing a standard PSO algorithm inheriting the abstract class written in Step 1. This means that a particular discrete PSO optimization algorithm will be implemented while inheriting the base class.

3. Writing unit tests and use-case examples This is to show how the proposed skeleton and algorithm will be used by the end-user, and of course some unit tests to check its robustness (please check the tests directory)

As you can see, the steps is asking for a lot of things. Right now, we’re setting this a low-priority because I am currently writing the abstract classes for the other PSO variants. If you think you wanted to be a super-contributor, then go ahead and do all the steps above. 👍 😄 But I believe it would be much better if I set-up a basis first then we iterate from there.

But perhaps, the best way to contribute on this issue would be the following: (note that these contributions don’t require pull requests)

• Propose features on how to implement the abstract classes. What do you think are the things to consider when making an abstract class for discrete PSO? You can use your domain-knowledge, and your past experience in handling discrete optimization problems to point out some helpful guides on how to set-up the abstract classes. I can take all of these into consideration when making the first commit in this issue.
• Suggest discrete PSO implementations that can be implemented in the future. If you’re planning to do this, please link the paper where it came from (it’s okay if there’s paywall). It would be better if the research is highly-cited, and is coming from reputable journals in the field of computational intelligence.

That’s it for this issue!! For any questions, just drop a comment here!

[DewaldDeJager]

I can’t find the exact paper right now but a masters thesis by the same author is available here: https://repository.up.ac.za/bitstream/handle/2263/55834/Langeveld_Set_2016.pdf See chapter 4, page 71.

I have looked at the discrete base class and it seems good for in general but it definitely needs changes for the set-based PSO.

Is there a Gitter or IRC channel for pyswarms? Have been wanting to ask or open an issue for a while now. I would be willing to provide help for newcomers there are well.

[ljvmiranda921]

Hi @DewaldDeJager, I’m closing this issue for now. If you wish to open-up a Pull Request regarding the set-based PSO you’ve proposed, please open up a new issue and we can converse from there. 👍