Statistical Linkage Learning (SLL) is a part of many state-of-the-art optimizers. The purpose of SLL is to discover variable interdependencies. It has been shown that the effectiveness of SLL-using optimizers is highly dependent on the quality of SLL-based problem decomposition. Thus, understanding what kind of problems are hard or easy to decompose by SLL is important for practice. In this work, we analytically estimate the size of a population sufficient for obtaining a perfect decomposition in case of concatenations of certain unitation-based functions. The experimental study confirms the accuracy of the proposed estimate. Finally, using the proposed estimate, we identify those problem types that may be considered hard for SLL-using optimizers.
@article{arxiv.2503.17397,
title = {Availability of Perfect Decomposition in Statistical Linkage Learning for Unitation-based Function Concatenations},
author = {Michal Prusik and Bartosz Frej and Michal W. Przewozniczek},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2503.17397},
year = {2025}
}