Related papers: On the Covariance-Hessian Relation in Evolution St…
A common view in evolutionary biology is that mutation rates are minimised. However, studies in combinatorial optimisation and search have shown a clear advantage of using variable mutation rates as a control parameter to optimise the…
In evolutionary game theory, an important measure of a mutant trait (strategy) is its ability to invade and take over an otherwise-monomorphic population. Typically, one quantifies the success of a mutant strategy via the probability that a…
This paper analyses a $(1,\lambda)$-Evolution Strategy, a randomised comparison-based adaptive search algorithm, on a simple constraint optimisation problem. The algorithm uses resampling to handle the constraint and optimizes a linear…
This work provides an efficient sampling method for the covariance matrix adaptation evolution strategy (CMA-ES) in large-scale settings. In contract to the Gaussian sampling in CMA-ES, the proposed method generates mutation vectors from a…
Theoretical analyses of evolution strategies are indispensable for gaining a deep understanding of their inner workings. For constrained problems, rather simple problems are of interest in the current research. This work presents a…
Evolution occurs in populations of reproducing individuals. The structure of a biological population affects which traits evolve. Understanding evolutionary game dynamics in structured populations is difficult. Precise results have been…
We evaluate a co-evolutionary calibration framework for the Heston model in which a genetic algorithm (GA) over parameters is coupled to an evolving neural inverse map from option surfaces to parameters. While GA-history sampling can reduce…
A key question in evolution is how likely a mutant is to take over. This depends on natural selection and on stochastic fluctuations. Population spatial structure can impact mutant fixation probabilities. We introduce a model for structured…
We are interested in modelling Darwinian evolution, resulting from the interplay of phenotypic variation and natural selection through ecological interactions. Our models are rooted in the microscopic, stochastic description of a population…
We design a class of variable metric evolution strategies well suited for high-dimensional problems. We target problems with many variables, not (necessarily) with many objectives. The construction combines two independent developments:…
Most research on adaptive decision-making takes a strategy-first approach, proposing a method of solving a problem and then examining whether it can be implemented in the brain and in what environments it succeeds. We present a method for…
Covariance matrix estimation is a fundamental statistical task in many applications, but the sample covariance matrix is sub-optimal when the sample size is comparable to or less than the number of features. Such high-dimensional settings…
Mutational robustness quantifies the effect of random mutations on fitness. When mutational robustness is high, most mutations do not change fitness or have only a minor effect on it. From the point of view of fitness landscapes, robust…
Evolution Strategies (ES) are stochastic derivative-free optimization algorithms whose most prominent representative, the CMA-ES algorithm, is widely used to solve difficult numerical optimization problems. We provide the first rigorous…
Frequency dependent selection and demographic fluctuations play important roles in evolutionary and ecological processes. Under frequency dependent selection, the average fitness of the population may increase or decrease based on…
Decision-making individuals often imitate their highest-earning fellows rather than optimize their own utilities, due to bounded rationality and incomplete information. Perpetual fluctuations between decisions have been reported as the…
Evolution strategies (ESs) are zeroth-order stochastic black-box optimization heuristics invariant to monotonic transformations of the objective function. They evolve a multivariate normal distribution, from which candidate solutions are…
While Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have long been investigated and applied, as well as theorized, we aim to provide a slightly different perspective into their nature -- through the perspective of their Hessian maps. The reason is…
Implementing Bayesian variable selection for linear Gaussian regression models for analysing high dimensional data sets is of current interest in many fields. In order to make such analysis operational, we propose a new sampling algorithm…
In evolutionary dynamics, a key measure of a mutant trait's success is the probability that it takes over the population given some initial mutant-appearance distribution. This "fixation probability" is difficult to compute in general, as…