randomsearch: A brief introduction
In randomsearch: Random Search for Expensive Functions

library(randomsearch)
set.seed(123)
knitr::opts_chunk$set(cache = TRUE, collapse = FALSE)

randomsearch

The package randomsearch optimizes a given smoof function. Use makeSingleObjectiveFunction() to wrap any function into a smoof function. It can make use of parallel resources through prallelMap. randomsearch has three internal operating modes:

fast.parallel is the default and used if only max.evals is defined as termination criterion. max.execbudget and target.fun.value have to be NULL.
slow.parallel is used if max.execbudget or target.fun.value have been set and parallelStart has been called without defined level or with level = randomsearch.feval. In this mode par.jobs (defaults to parallelGetOptions()$settings$cpus) instances are started. Each instance conducts a random search until the termination criterion is met. The instances communicate using a shared folder (par.dir = ~/.randomsearch/).
normal is used if no parallel mode is started and if max.execbudget or target.fun.value have been set. Note, that this introduces an overhead to fast.parallel even without parallelization because the termination criterion is checked after each evaluation.

Usage

Simple usage with functions that use a vector as input:

fun = function(x) x[1]^2 + sin(x[2])
res = randomsearch(fun, lower = c(-1, -1), upper = c(2,2), minimize = TRUE, max.evals = 30)
rs = summary(res)
rs$best.x
rs$best.y

tail(as.data.frame(res))

Discrete and hierarchical search spaces

For usage with more complicated search spaces you have to define a smoof function. This allows you to tune over discrete parameters and even hierarchical parameter sets like in this example. Here the parameter y is only active if a==a2.

fun = function(x) {
  if (x$a == "a1") {
    x$x^2
  } else if (x$a == "a2") {
    sin(x$x * x$z) + 1
  }
}
obj.fun = makeSingleObjectiveFunction(
  fn = fun,
  par.set = makeParamSet(
    makeDiscreteParam("a", values = c("a1", "a2")),
    makeNumericParam("x", lower = -3, upper = 3),
    makeNumericParam("z", lower = 0, upper = 2, requires = quote(a == "a2"))
  ),
  minimize = TRUE,
  has.simple.signature = FALSE
)
res = randomsearch(obj.fun, max.evals = 30)
rs = summary(res)
rs$best.x
rs$best.y

tail(as.data.frame(res))

Parallel Usage

Note: For Windows use parallelStartSocket().

fun = function(x) {
  Sys.sleep(runif(1))
  x[1]^2 + sin(x[2])
}

parallelMap::parallelStartMulticore(cpus = 2, level = "randomsearch.feval")
res = randomsearch(fun, lower = c(-1, -1), upper = c(2,2), minimize = TRUE, max.execbudget = 2, max.evals = 1000)
parallelMap::parallelStop()
summary(res)

Multi-objective optimization

Note: randomsearch() detects a multi-objective optimization by the length of the minimize vector.

obj.fun = function(x) c(x[1]^2 + sin(x[2]), cos(x[1]))
res = randomsearch(obj.fun, lower = c(-1, -1), upper = c(2,2), minimize = c(TRUE, TRUE), max.evals = 30)
summary(res)

Of course multi-objective optimization works with smoof functions as well. A multi-objective smoof function is constructed as follows:

obj.fun = makeMultiObjectiveFunction(
  fn = function(x) c(x[1]^2 + sin(x[2]), cos(x[1])),
  par.set = makeNumericParamSet(len = 2, lower = -1, upper = 2),
  minimize = c(TRUE, TRUE)
)
res = randomsearch(obj.fun, max.evals = 10)

Augment random search

You can simply augment the results of a random search with additional random search results by converting the old result to a data.frame and use it as an input for a new random search.

fun = function(x) x[1]^2 + sin(x[2])
res = randomsearch(fun, lower = c(-1, -1), upper = c(2,2), minimize = TRUE, max.evals = 10)
summary(res)
des = as.data.frame(res)
res = randomsearch(fun, lower = c(-1, -1), upper = c(2,2), minimize = TRUE, max.evals = 1000, target.fun.value = -0.4)
summary(res)