Pareto front sounds like an interesting way to optimize, but it suffers from the curse of dimensionality just like anything else.
As the number of objectives (dimensions) increases, the number of samples you need to cover the frontier increases exponentially. You will very rarely find solutions that actually dominate other solutions in many practical optimization scenarios. With 2 dimensions you have a 25% chance of domination. With 10 dimensions it's a .098% chance.
The most useful cases I've seen tend to occur where we just optimize for two things at once. The chances of domination are high, it's easy to visualize and very efficient to implement. As we get into higher dimensional spaces, things get weird really fast.
The curse of dimensionality times the reality that good metrics are elusive or themselves a bit cursed. Many outcomes you're engineering or product-managing toward are quite squishy, hard to define, and hard to evaluate. "Easy to use" or "can be used within 10 minutes" or "cleans up this current order form" are easy to state but hard to rate and/or hard to actionably implement as metrics.
I've built large, deep product evaluation frameworks, and it is 100% of the time a running argument with stakeholders, inside and out, "well you should have measured it this way" or "I think we should be targeting X not Y" or "why didn't you consider Z in the metric??"
The Pareto Front in practice is squishy, fuzzy, and often quite moist and moldy.
bob1029 · · focus · HN ↗
As the number of objectives (dimensions) increases, the number of samples you need to cover the frontier increases exponentially. You will very rarely find solutions that actually dominate other solutions in many practical optimization scenarios. With 2 dimensions you have a 25% chance of domination. With 10 dimensions it's a .098% chance.
The most useful cases I've seen tend to occur where we just optimize for two things at once. The chances of domination are high, it's easy to visualize and very efficient to implement. As we get into higher dimensional spaces, things get weird really fast.
jonathaneunice · · focus · HN ↗
I've built large, deep product evaluation frameworks, and it is 100% of the time a running argument with stakeholders, inside and out, "well you should have measured it this way" or "I think we should be targeting X not Y" or "why didn't you consider Z in the metric??"
The Pareto Front in practice is squishy, fuzzy, and often quite moist and moldy.