Convergence guarantees for generalized adaptive stochastic search methods for continuous global optimization

This paper presents some simple technical conditions that guarantee the convergence of a general class of adaptive stochastic global optimization algorithms. By imposing some conditions on the probability distributions that generate the iterates, these stochastic algorithms can be shown to converge to the global optimum in a probabilistic sense. These results also apply to global optimization algorithms that combine local and global stochastic search strategies and also those algorithms that combine deterministic and stochastic search strategies. This makes the results applicable to a wide range of global optimization algorithms that are useful in practice. Moreover, this paper provides convergence conditions involving the conditional densities of the random vector iterates that are easy to verify in practice. It also provides some convergence conditions in the special case when the iterates are generated by elliptical distributions such as the multivariate Normal and Cauchy distributions. These results are then used to prove the convergence of some practical stochastic global optimization algorithms, including an evolutionary programming algorithm. In addition, this paper introduces the notion of a stochastic algorithm being probabilistically dense in the domain of the function and shows that, under simple assumptions, this is equivalent to seeing any point in the domain with probability 1. This, in turn, is equivalent to almost sure convergence to the global minimum. Finally, some simple results on convergence rates are also proved. (C) 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.