Beyond the Pareto Front: Utilizing the Entire Population for Decision-Making in Evolutionary Machine Learning
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Decision-making plays a pivotal role in data-driven optimization, aiming to achieve optimal results by identifying the most effective combination of input variables. Traditionally, in multi-objective data-driven optimization problems, decision-making relies solely on the Pareto front derived from the training data, as provided by the optimizer. This approach limits consideration to a subset of solutions and often overlooks potentially superior solutions on test set within the optimizer’s final population. What if we include the entire final population in the decision-making process? This paper is the first to systematically explore the potential of utilizing the entire final population, rather than relying solely on the optimization Pareto front, for decision-making in data-driven multi-objective optimization. This novel perspective reveals overlooked yet potentially superior solutions that generalize better to unseen data and help mitigate issues such as overfitting and training-data bias. This paper highlights the use of the entire final population of the optimizer for final decision-making in multi-objective optimization. Using feature selection as a case study, this method is evaluated on two key objectives: minimizing classification error rate and reducing the number of selected features. We compare the proposed test Pareto front, derived from the final population, with traditional test Pareto fronts based on training data. Experiments conducted on fifteen large-scale datasets reveal that some optimal solutions within the entire population are overlooked when focusing solely on the optimization Pareto front. This indicates that the solutions on the optimization Pareto front are not necessarily the optimal solutions for real-world unseen data. There may be additional solutions in the final population yet to be utilized for decision-making.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.008 | 0.014 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".