Related papers: Analysing Equilibrium States for Population Divers…
In the real world, there exist a class of optimization problems that multiple (local) optimal solutions in the solution space correspond to a single point in the objective space. In this paper, we theoretically show that for such multimodal…
Predicting the adaptation of populations to a changing environment is crucial to assess the impact of human activities on biodiversity. Many theoretical studies have tackled this issue by modeling the evolution of quantitative traits…
Conventional population genetics considers the evolution of a limited number of genotypes corresponding to phenotypes with different fitness. As model phenotypes, in particular RNA secondary structure, have become computationally tractable,…
We study the evolution of large but finite asexual populations evolving in fitness landscapes in which all mutations are either neutral or strongly deleterious. We demonstrate that despite the absence of higher fitness genotypes, adaptation…
Exploration is a key problem in reinforcement learning, since agents can only learn from data they acquire in the environment. With that in mind, maintaining a population of agents is an attractive method, as it allows data be collected…
The expansion of a population into new habitat is a transient process that leaves its footprints in the genetic composition of the expanding population. How the structure of the environment shapes the population front and the evolutionary…
It is generally accepted that "diversity" is associated with success in evolutionary algorithms. However, diversity is a broad concept that can be measured and defined in a multitude of ways. To date, most evolutionary computation research…
We investigate the evolution of populations of random Boolean networks under selection for robustness of the dynamics with respect to the perturbation of the state of a node. The fitness landscape contains a huge plateau of maximum fitness…
The n-person Prisoner's Dilemma is a widely used model for populations where individuals interact in groups. The evolutionary stability of populations has been analysed in the literature for the case where mutations in the population may be…
Over time, a population acquires neutral genetic substitutions as a consequence of random drift. A famous result in population genetics asserts that the rate, $K$, at which these substitutions accumulate in the population coincides with the…
There are many combinatorial optimization problems whose solutions are best represented by permutations. The classic traveling salesperson seeks an optimal ordering over a set of cities. Scheduling problems often seek optimal orderings of…
We investigate a family of $(\mu+\lambda)$ Genetic Algorithms (GAs) which creates offspring either from mutation or by recombining two randomly chosen parents. By scaling the crossover probability, we can thus interpolate from a fully…
Environmental changes greatly influence the evolution of populations. Here, we study the dynamics of a population of two strains, one growing slightly faster than the other, competing for resources in a time-varying binary environment…
Evolutionary algorithms (EAs) form a popular optimisation paradigm inspired by natural evolution. In recent years the field of evolutionary computation has developed a rigorous analytical theory to analyse their runtime on many illustrative…
Some species exhibit very high levels of DNA sequence variability; there is also evidence for the existence of heritable epigenetic variants that experience state changes at a much higher rate than sequence variants. In both cases, the…
The dynamics of adaptation is difficult to predict because it is highly stochastic even in large populations. The uncertainty emerges from number fluctuations, called genetic drift, arising in the small number of particularly fit…
Evolutionary Algorithms (EAs) and other randomized search heuristics are often considered as unbiased algorithms that are invariant with respect to different transformations of the underlying search space. However, if a certain amount of…
In large populations, multiple beneficial mutations may be simultaneously spreading. In asexual populations, these mutations must either arise on the same background or compete against each other. In sexual populations, recombination can…
Evolution occurs in populations of reproducing individuals. It is well known that population structure can affect evolutionary dynamics. Traditionally, natural selection is studied between mutants that differ in reproductive rate, but are…
The evolutionary diversity optimization aims at finding a diverse set of solutions which satisfy some constraint on their fitness. In the context of multi-objective optimization this constraint can require solutions to be Pareto-optimal. In…