Application of Dueling DQN and DECGA for Parameter Estimation in Variogram Models

Parameter estimation of variogram models is an important problem in geostatistics and environmental engineering. Most of existing works aim to estimate parameters of variogram single models, while neglecting the parameter estimation of variogram nested model. Most recently, the evolutionary algorithms(EA), including genetic algorithm(GA), are exploited to calculate the parameters of variogram model, which can obtain a more accurate solution. These methods have some hyper-parameters to set and suffer from the well-recognized premature convergence and slow global convergence problem of EA. In this paper, a double elite co-evolutionary genetic algorithm(DECGA) and deep reinforcement learning(dueling DQN) was introduced to estimate the parameters of variogram single or nested models so as to achieve better generalization performance. The DECGA can get the global optimal solution faster than GA with the help of dueling DQN, which can set the hyper-parameters according to the state of DECGA. To verify the effectiveness of the proposed method(DDQNGA), we conduct experiments on the agricultural heavy metal database. Experimental results demonstrate that our method can obtain parameter estimation more accurately. The method proposed in this paper have a certain practical value in the field of geostatistics and environmental engineering.