Branching Adaptive Surrogate Search Optimization (BASSO)

Global optimization of black-box functions is challenging in high dimensions. We introduce a conceptual adaptive random search framework, Branching Adaptive Surrogate Search Optimization (BASSO), that combines partitioning and surrogate modeling for subregion sampling. We present a finite-time analysis of BASSO, and establish conditions under which it is theoretically possible to scale to high dimensions. While we do not expect that any implementation will achieve the theoretical ideal, we experiment with several BASSO variations and discuss implications on narrowing the gap between theory and implementation. Numerical results on test problems are presented.