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Fitting Statistical Models of Random Search in Simulation Studies

Published: 01 July 2013 Publication History

Abstract

We consider optimization of expected system performance by random search. There are two sources of random variation in this process: (i) a search-induced variability because the expected performance of the system will vary randomly according to the alternatives randomly selected for examination, and (ii) a simulation induced variability, because there will be random error in estimating expected system performance from finite simulation runs. We show that, in altering the balance between these two sources of variability, three distinct forms of asymptotic behavior of the estimate of the optimal expected system performance are possible. The form of the asymptotic results shows that they may be not be easy to apply in practical work. As an alternative, a methodology for fitting a statistical model that accounts for both types of variability is suggested. This then allows the distributional properties of quantities of interest, like the optimum performance value and the best value obtained by the search, to be estimated by resampling and which also allows a test of goodness of fit of the model. Four numerical examples are given.

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cover image ACM Transactions on Modeling and Computer Simulation
ACM Transactions on Modeling and Computer Simulation  Volume 23, Issue 3
July 2013
126 pages
ISSN:1049-3301
EISSN:1558-1195
DOI:10.1145/2499913
Issue’s Table of Contents
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Publication History

Published: 01 July 2013
Accepted: 01 October 2011
Revised: 01 October 2011
Received: 01 February 2008
Published in TOMACS Volume 23, Issue 3

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Author Tags

  1. Optimization by random search
  2. bootstrapping
  3. convolution models
  4. embedded models

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