Related papers: Adaptive Drift Analysis
We consider the question of the stability of evolutionary algorithms to gradual changes, or drift, in the target concept. We define an algorithm to be resistant to drift if, for some inverse polynomial drift rate in the target function, it…
In this paper we revisit the question how hard it can be for the $(1+1)$ Evolutionary Algorithm to optimize monotone pseudo-Boolean functions. By introducing a more pessimistic stochastic process, the partially-ordered evolutionary…
The $(1 + (\lambda,\lambda))$ genetic algorithm is a younger evolutionary algorithm trying to profit also from inferior solutions. Rigorous runtime analyses on unimodal fitness functions showed that it can indeed be faster than classical…
To gain a better theoretical understanding of how evolutionary algorithms (EAs) cope with plateaus of constant fitness, we propose the $n$-dimensional Plateau$_k$ function as natural benchmark and analyze how different variants of the $(1 +…
Despite significant progress in the theory of evolutionary algorithms, the theoretical understanding of evolutionary algorithms which use non-trivial populations remains challenging and only few rigorous results exist. Already for the most…
We analyse the performance of well-known evolutionary algorithms (1+1)EA and (1+$\lambda$)EA in the prior noise model, where in each fitness evaluation the search point is altered before evaluation with probability $p$. We present refined…
For the last ten years, almost every theoretical result concerning the expected run time of a randomized search heuristic used drift theory, making it the arguably most important tool in this domain. Its success is due to its ease of use…
Drift analysis is a powerful tool for analyzing the time complexity of evolutionary algorithms. However, it requires manual construction of drift functions to bound hitting time for each specific algorithm and problem. To address this…
The OneMax problem, alternatively known as the Hamming distance problem, is often referred to as the "drosophila of evolutionary computation (EC)", because of its high relevance in theoretical and empirical analyses of EC approaches. It is…
For genetic algorithms using a bit-string representation of length~$n$, the general recommendation is to take $1/n$ as mutation rate. In this work, we discuss whether this is really justified for multimodal functions. Taking jump functions…
A runtime analysis of the Univariate Marginal Distribution Algorithm (UMDA) is presented on the OneMax function for wide ranges of its parameters $\mu$ and $\lambda$. If $\mu\ge c\log n$ for some constant $c>0$ and…
We propose a new method based on discrete Fourier analysis to analyze the time evolutionary algorithms spend on plateaus. This immediately gives a concise proof of the classic estimate of the expected runtime of the $(1+1)$ evolutionary…
Understanding how evolutionary algorithms perform on constrained problems has gained increasing attention in recent years. In this paper, we study how evolutionary algorithms optimize constrained versions of the classical LeadingOnes…
We study the $(1,\lambda)$-EA with mutation rate $c/n$ for $c\le 1$, where the population size is adaptively controlled with the $(1:s+1)$-success rule. Recently, Hevia Fajardo and Sudholt have shown that this setup with $c=1$ is efficient…
The compact Genetic Algorithm (cGA), parameterized by its hypothetical population size $K$, offers a low-memory alternative to evolving a large offspring population of solutions. It evolves a probability distribution, biasing it towards…
The decomposition-based multi-objective evolutionary algorithm (MOEA/D) does not directly optimize a given multi-objective function $f$, but instead optimizes $N + 1$ single-objective subproblems of $f$ in a co-evolutionary manner. It…
Most evolutionary algorithms (EAs) used in practice employ crossover. In contrast, only for few and mostly artificial examples a runtime advantage from crossover could be proven with mathematical means. The most convincing such result shows…
We present a new method for proving lower bounds on the expected running time of evolutionary algorithms. It is based on fitness-level partitions and an additional condition on transition probabilities between fitness levels. The method is…
A decent number of lower bounds for non-elitist population-based evolutionary algorithms has been shown by now. Most of them are technically demanding due to the (hard to avoid) use of negative drift theorems -- general results which…
The one-fifth success rule is one of the best-known and most widely accepted techniques to control the parameters of evolutionary algorithms. While it is often applied in the literal sense, a common interpretation sees the one-fifth success…