This paper proposes a novel method of global optimization based on cuckoo-host co-evaluation. It also develops a Fortran-77 code for the algorithm. The algorithm has been tested on 96 benchmark functions (of which the results of 30 relatively harder problems have been reported). The proposed...

Rank-ordering of individuals or objects on multiple criteria has many important practical applications. A reasonably representative composite rank ordering of multi-attribute objects/individuals or multi-dimensional points is often obtained by the Principal Component Analysis, although much...

Based on the bibliographical data available with the RePEc (Research Papers in Economics), the Internet Documents in Economics Access Service (IDEAS) publishes every month the up-dated academic rankings of different geographic regions (countries/states in the US). This paper raises the question...

In this paper, 13 different types of composite indices are constructed by linear combination of indicator variables (with and without outliers/data corruption). Weights of different indicator variables are obtained by maximizing the sum of squared (and, alternatively, absolute) correlation...

Effects of outliers on mean, standard deviation and Pearson's correlation coefficient are well known. The Principal Components analysis uses Pearson's product moment correlation coefficients to construct composite indices from indicator variables and hence may be very sensitive to effects of...

In the extant literature a suggestion has been made to solve the nearest correlation matrix problem by a modified von Neumann approximation. This paper shows that obtaining the nearest positive semi-definite matrix from a given non-positivesemi-definite correlation matrix by such a method is...

This paper proposes a method to construct composite index, which is a linear combination of several variables, by deriving weights on the criterion of Shapley value (from cooperative game theory) that a constituent variable has in making the composite index. In practice it is found oftentimes...

Keane's bump function is considered as a standard benchmark for nonlinear constrained optimization. It is highly multi-modal and its optimum is located at the non-linear constrained boundary. The true minimum of this function is, perhaps, unknown. We intend in this paper to optimize Keane's...

In this paper we compare the performance of the Barter method, a newly introduced population-based (stochastic) heuristic to search the global optimum of a (continuous) multi-modal function, with that of two other well-established and very powerful methods, namely, the Simulated Annealing (SA)...

The objective of this paper is to introduce a new population-based (stochastic) heuristic to search the global optimum of a (continuous) multi-modal function and to assess its performance (on a fairly large number of benchmark functions) vis-a-vis that of two other well-established and very...