R with MOEA Framework using Renjin Script Engine

Using R with Java is painful, ugly.

While I was recently revisiting REpochX which I quickly wrote long time ago to evolve R grammars using Grammatical Evolution, I decided to do the same with MOEA Framework instead of EpochX as the latter does not look actively maintained.

Firstly, MOEA Framework is very comprehensive and the coding practice is a lot moderner compared to similar evolutionary computing libraries.

But, again, R/Java bindings... That's killing me.

There are quite a few different ways which we used in the past: JRI (from rJava), Rserve, OpenCPU and so on. All these require the programmer to manage an R installation and instances/daemons.

Enabled by the Java scripting interface, Renjin solves this mess nicely. Similar to jpython, jruby etc..., you can program in R in Java by passing R statements to the respective R scripting engine and consume results: R Language implemented in Java.

Renjin is not complete. The packaging system mimics the original R packaging, but there are many (now mainstream) libraries which are not available to Renjin users.

Nevermind... Below is a simple Java program which demonstrates the idea of using R with MOEA Framework through the Renjin Script Engine.

Don't forget to add the following to your pom.xml:

  <dependency>
    <groupId>org.moeaframework</groupId>
    <artifactId>moeaframework</artifactId>
    <version>2.6</version>
  </dependency>

  <dependency>
    <groupId>org.renjin</groupId>
    <artifactId>renjin-script-engine</artifactId>
    <version>0.7.0-RC7</version>
  </dependency>