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On crossing fitness valleys with majority-vote crossover and estimation-of-distribution algorithms

Published: 06 September 2021 Publication History

Abstract

The benefits of using crossover in crossing fitness gaps have been studied extensively in evolutionary computation. Recent runtime results show that majority-vote crossover is particularly efficient at optimizing the well-known Jump benchmark function that includes a fitness gap next to the global optimum. Also estimation-of-distribution algorithms (EDAs), which use an implicit crossover, are much more efficient on Jump than typical mutation-based algorithms. However, the allowed gap size for polynomial runtimes with EDAs is at most logarithmic in the problem dimension n.
In this paper, we investigate variants of the Jump function where the gap is shifted and appears in the middle of the typical search trajectory. Such gaps can still be overcome efficiently in time O (n log n) by majority-vote crossover and an estimation-of-distribution algorithm, even for gap sizes almost [EQUATION]. However, if the global optimum is located in the gap instead of the usual all-ones string, majority-vote crossover would nevertheless approach the all-ones string and be highly inefficient. In sharp contrast, an EDA can still find such a shifted optimum efficiently. Thanks to a general property called fair sampling, the EDA will with high probability sample from almost every fitness level of the function, including levels in the gap, and sample the global optimum even though the overall search trajectory points towards the all-ones string. Finally, we derive limits on the gap size allowing efficient runtimes for the EDA.

Supplementary Material

MP4 File (foga21-video4.mp4)
presentation at FOGA'21 by C. Witt on the paper "On crossing fitness valleys with majority-vote crossover and estimation-of-distribution algorithms"

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    FOGA '21: Proceedings of the 16th ACM/SIGEVO Conference on Foundations of Genetic Algorithms
    September 2021
    130 pages
    ISBN:9781450383523
    DOI:10.1145/3450218
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    Published: 06 September 2021

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    Author Tags

    1. crossover
    2. estimation-of-distribution algorithms
    3. jump function
    4. multimodal functions
    5. randomized search heuristics
    6. runtime analysis

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    • Danish Council for Independent Research

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    FOGA '21
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    FOGA '21: Foundations of Genetic Algorithms XVI
    September 6 - 8, 2021
    Virtual Event, Austria

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    FOGA '21 Paper Acceptance Rate 10 of 21 submissions, 48%;
    Overall Acceptance Rate 72 of 131 submissions, 55%

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