English

Is perturbation an effective restart strategy?

Neural and Evolutionary Computing 2019-12-06 v1 Artificial Intelligence

Abstract

Premature convergence can be detrimental to the performance of search methods, which is why many search algorithms include restart strategies to deal with it. While it is common to perturb the incumbent solution with diversification steps of various sizes with the hope that the search method will find a new basin of attraction leading to a better local optimum, it is usually not clear how big the perturbation step should be. We introduce a new property of fitness landscapes termed "Neighbours with Similar Fitness" and we demonstrate that the effectiveness of a restart strategy depends on this property.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1912.02535,
  title  = {Is perturbation an effective restart strategy?},
  author = {Aldeida Aleti and Mark Wallace and Markus Wagner},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1912.02535},
  year   = {2019}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-23T12:36:48.100Z