A large number of engineering, science, and computational problems have yet to be solved in a computationally efficient way. One of the emerging challenges is how evolving technologies grow towards autonomy and intelligent decision making. This leads to collection of large amounts of data from various sensing and measurement technologies, e.g., cameras, smart phones, health sensors, smart electricity meters, and environment sensors. Hence, it is imperative to develop efficient algorithms for generation, analysis, classification, and illustration of data. Meanwhile, data is structured purposefully through different representations, such as large-scale networks and graphs. Therefore, data plays a pivotal role in technologies by introducing several challenges: how to present, what to present, why to present. Researchers explored various approaches to implement a comprehensive solution to express their results in every particular domain, such that the solution enhances the performance and minimizes cost, especially time complexity. In this chapter, we focus on data science as a crucial area, specifically focusing on a curse of dimensionality (CoD) which is due to the large amount of generated/sensed/collected data, especially large sets of extracted features for a particular purpose. This motivates researchers to think about optimization and apply nature-inspired algorithms, such as meta-heuristic and evolutionary algorithms (EAs) to solve large-scale optimization problems. Building on the strategies of these algorithms, researchers solve large-scale engineering and computational problems with innovative solutions. Although these algorithms look un-deterministic, they are robust enough to reach an optimal solution. To that end, researchers try to run their algorithms more than usually suggested, around 20 or 30 times, then they compute the mean of result and report only the average of 20/30 runs’ result. This high number of runs becomes necessary because EAs, based on their randomness initialization, converge the best result, which would not be correct if only relying on one specific run. Certainly, researchers do not adopt evolutionary algorithms unless they face a problem which is suffering from placement in local optimal solution, rather than global optimal solution. In this chapter, we first develop a clear and formal definition of the CoD problem, next we focus on feature extraction techniques and categories, then we provide a general overview of meta-heuristic algorithms, its terminology, and desirable properties of evolutionary algorithms.
