A Sampling Strategy for High-Dimensional, Simulation-Based Transportation Optimization Problems
Bibliographic record
Abstract
When tackling high-dimensional, continuous simulation-based optimization (SO) problems, it is important to balance exploration and exploitation. Most past SO research focuses on the enhancement of exploitation techniques. The exploration technique of an SO algorithm is often defined as a general-purpose sampling distribution, such as the uniform distribution, which is inefficient at searching high-dimensional spaces. This work is motivated by the formulation of exploration techniques that are suitable for large-scale transportation network problems and high-dimensional optimization problems. We formulate a sampling mechanism that combines inverse cumulative distribution function sampling with problem-specific structural information of the underlying transportation problem. The proposed sampling distribution assigns greater sampling probability to points with better expected performance as defined by an analytical network model. Validation experiments on a toy network illustrate that the proposed sampling distribution has important commonalities with the underlying and typically unknown true sampling distribution of the simulator. We study a high-dimensional traffic signal control case study of Midtown Manhattan in New York City. The results show that the use of the proposed sampling mechanism as part of an SO framework can help to efficiently identify solutions with good performance. Using the analytical information for exploration, regardless of whether it is used for exploitation, outperforms benchmarks that do not use it, including standard Bayesian optimization. Using the analytical information for exploration only yields solutions with similar performance than when the information is used for exploitation only, reducing the total compute times by 65%. This paper sheds light on the importance of developing suitable exploration techniques to enhance both the scalability and the compute efficiency of general-purpose SO algorithms. Funding: T. Tay thanks the Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR) Singapore for funding his work. Supplemental Material: The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/trsc.2023.0110 .
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".