<p>I have been reading the paper <a href="http://www.ressources-actuarielles.net/EXT/ISFA/1226.nsf/0/f84f7ac703bf5862c12576d8002f5259/$FILE/Jones98.pdf" rel="nofollow">Efficient Global Optimization of Expensive Black-Box Functions</a> by Jones, et al. and they describe maximizing the expectation of a metric they created, called the improvement metric, for global optimization and seems like a really neat idea. I thought to myself it would be a fun idea to try and follow their analysis but to formulate it under my own new metric. However, I have been unable to come up, conceptually, with any metric that seems like an intuitive thing to try to maximize (or minimize) to help guide an optimization algorithm.</p>

<p>So, with that said, I don't have any idea what sort of metric I would pitch as being a good one to explore, and so I wanted to know if there are any places on stack exchange that would be a good (or acceptable) place to ask a question like this?  I basically want to be able to ask the community as a whole to help me brainstorm ideas but I wasn't sure if this is allowable given that I don't have an idea for the metric formulated myself. </p>
