S. Muelas, A. Mendiburu, A. LaTorre, and J.-M. Peña (Spain)
Evolutionary Computing, Graphical Models, Estimation of Distribution Algorithms, Island Models
One of the most promising areas in which probabilistic graphical models have shown an incipient activity is the field of heuristic optimization and, in particular, in the Estimation of Distribution Algorithms (EDAs). EDAs constitute a well-known family of Evolutionary Computation techniques, similar to Genetic Algorithms. Due to their inherent parallelism, different research lines have been studied trying to improve EDAs from the point of view of execution time and/or accuracy. Among these proposals, we focus on the so-called island-based models. This approach defines several islands (EDA instances) running indepen dently and exchanging information with a given frequency. The information sent by the islands can be a set of individuals or a probabilistic model. This paper presents a comparative study of both information exchanging techniques for a univariate EDA (UMDAg) over a wide set of param eters and problems –the standard benchmark developed for the IEEE Workshop on Evolutionary Algorithms and other Metaheuristics for Continuous Optimization Problems of the ISDA 2009 Conference. The study concludes that the configurations based on migrating individuals obtain better results.
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