Mittagsseminar Talk Information

Date and Time: Tuesday, January 27, 2009, 12:15 pm

Duration: This information is not available in the database

Location: CAB G51

Speaker: Christian Lorenz Müller (Mosaic Group)

Stochastic search and randomized algorithms for energy landscapes (Part II)

Many research questions in chemistry, biology and bioinformatics can be reformulated as search problems that are characterized by high dimensionality, non-convexity and noise. A prominent example is the protein folding problem (that is known to be NP-hard) that can be considered as an optimization problem over an energy landscape. In most case, such problems can only be tackled by stochastic search/optimization heuristics.

One of the most successful gradient-less optimization heuristic for non-convex, real-valued functions is the Evolution Strategy with Covariance Matrix Adaptation (CMA-ES). In the seminar we will present an extension of this algorithm, the Particle Swarm CMA-ES (PS-CMA-ES) algorithm that shows excellent performance on several hard benchmark problems. This heuristic can also be interpreted as a stochastic branch-and-bound algorithm.

In the outlook we will also give some insights about the interpretation of energy landscapes as weighted graphs, and the connection between protein folding and the MaxFlow-MinCut problem, and some open research topics. Hopefully, this seminar can stimulate future collaboration.

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