Analyzing Evolutionary Algorithms

Analyzing Evolutionary Algorithms
Author: Thomas Jansen
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Total Pages: 264
Release: 2013-01-24
Genre: Computers
ISBN: 364217339X

Evolutionary algorithms is a class of randomized heuristics inspired by natural evolution. They are applied in many different contexts, in particular in optimization, and analysis of such algorithms has seen tremendous advances in recent years. In this book the author provides an introduction to the methods used to analyze evolutionary algorithms and other randomized search heuristics. He starts with an algorithmic and modular perspective and gives guidelines for the design of evolutionary algorithms. He then places the approach in the broader research context with a chapter on theoretical perspectives. By adopting a complexity-theoretical perspective, he derives general limitations for black-box optimization, yielding lower bounds on the performance of evolutionary algorithms, and then develops general methods for deriving upper and lower bounds step by step. This main part is followed by a chapter covering practical applications of these methods. The notational and mathematical basics are covered in an appendix, the results presented are derived in detail, and each chapter ends with detailed comments and pointers to further reading. So the book is a useful reference for both graduate students and researchers engaged with the theoretical analysis of such algorithms.

Evolutionary Algorithms

Evolutionary Algorithms
Author: William M. Spears
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Total Pages: 244
Release: 2000-06-15
Genre: Computers
ISBN: 9783540669500

Despite decades of work in evolutionary algorithms, there remains an uncertainty as to the relative benefits and detriments of using recombination or mutation. This book provides a characterization of the roles that recombination and mutation play in evolutionary algorithms. It integrates important prior work and introduces new theoretical techniques for studying evolutionary algorithms. Consequences of the theory are explored and a novel method for comparing search and optimization algorithms is introduced. The focus allows the book to bridge multiple communities, including evolutionary biologists and population geneticists.

Evolutionary Optimization Algorithms

Evolutionary Optimization Algorithms
Author: Dan Simon
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 776
Release: 2013-06-13
Genre: Mathematics
ISBN: 1118659503

A clear and lucid bottom-up approach to the basic principles of evolutionary algorithms Evolutionary algorithms (EAs) are a type of artificial intelligence. EAs are motivated by optimization processes that we observe in nature, such as natural selection, species migration, bird swarms, human culture, and ant colonies. This book discusses the theory, history, mathematics, and programming of evolutionary optimization algorithms. Featured algorithms include genetic algorithms, genetic programming, ant colony optimization, particle swarm optimization, differential evolution, biogeography-based optimization, and many others. Evolutionary Optimization Algorithms: Provides a straightforward, bottom-up approach that assists the reader in obtaining a clear but theoretically rigorous understanding of evolutionary algorithms, with an emphasis on implementation Gives a careful treatment of recently developed EAs including opposition-based learning, artificial fish swarms, bacterial foraging, and many others and discusses their similarities and differences from more well-established EAs Includes chapter-end problems plus a solutions manual available online for instructors Offers simple examples that provide the reader with an intuitive understanding of the theory Features source code for the examples available on the author's website Provides advanced mathematical techniques for analyzing EAs, including Markov modeling and dynamic system modeling Evolutionary Optimization Algorithms: Biologically Inspired and Population-Based Approaches to Computer Intelligence is an ideal text for advanced undergraduate students, graduate students, and professionals involved in engineering and computer science.

Theory of Evolutionary Computation

Theory of Evolutionary Computation
Author: Benjamin Doerr
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 506
Release: 2019-11-20
Genre: Computers
ISBN: 3030294145

This edited book reports on recent developments in the theory of evolutionary computation, or more generally the domain of randomized search heuristics. It starts with two chapters on mathematical methods that are often used in the analysis of randomized search heuristics, followed by three chapters on how to measure the complexity of a search heuristic: black-box complexity, a counterpart of classical complexity theory in black-box optimization; parameterized complexity, aimed at a more fine-grained view of the difficulty of problems; and the fixed-budget perspective, which answers the question of how good a solution will be after investing a certain computational budget. The book then describes theoretical results on three important questions in evolutionary computation: how to profit from changing the parameters during the run of an algorithm; how evolutionary algorithms cope with dynamically changing or stochastic environments; and how population diversity influences performance. Finally, the book looks at three algorithm classes that have only recently become the focus of theoretical work: estimation-of-distribution algorithms; artificial immune systems; and genetic programming. Throughout the book the contributing authors try to develop an understanding for how these methods work, and why they are so successful in many applications. The book will be useful for students and researchers in theoretical computer science and evolutionary computing.

Experimental Methods for the Analysis of Optimization Algorithms

Experimental Methods for the Analysis of Optimization Algorithms
Author: Thomas Bartz-Beielstein
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Total Pages: 469
Release: 2010-11-02
Genre: Computers
ISBN: 3642025382

In operations research and computer science it is common practice to evaluate the performance of optimization algorithms on the basis of computational results, and the experimental approach should follow accepted principles that guarantee the reliability and reproducibility of results. However, computational experiments differ from those in other sciences, and the last decade has seen considerable methodological research devoted to understanding the particular features of such experiments and assessing the related statistical methods. This book consists of methodological contributions on different scenarios of experimental analysis. The first part overviews the main issues in the experimental analysis of algorithms, and discusses the experimental cycle of algorithm development; the second part treats the characterization by means of statistical distributions of algorithm performance in terms of solution quality, runtime and other measures; and the third part collects advanced methods from experimental design for configuring and tuning algorithms on a specific class of instances with the goal of using the least amount of experimentation. The contributor list includes leading scientists in algorithm design, statistical design, optimization and heuristics, and most chapters provide theoretical background and are enriched with case studies. This book is written for researchers and practitioners in operations research and computer science who wish to improve the experimental assessment of optimization algorithms and, consequently, their design.

Parallel Problem Solving from Nature - PPSN X

Parallel Problem Solving from Nature - PPSN X
Author: Günter Rudolph
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Total Pages: 1183
Release: 2008-09-10
Genre: Computers
ISBN: 3540876995

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Parallel Problem Solving from Nature, PPSN 2008, held in Dortmund, Germany, in September 2008. The 114 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 206 submissions. The conference covers a wide range of topics, such as evolutionary computation, quantum computation, molecular computation, neural computation, artificial life, swarm intelligence, artificial ant systems, artificial immune systems, self-organizing systems, emergent behaviors, and applications to real-world problems. The paper are organized in topical sections on formal theory, new techniques, experimental analysis, multiobjective optimization, hybrid methods, and applications.

Theory of Randomized Search Heuristics

Theory of Randomized Search Heuristics
Author: Anne Auger
Publisher: World Scientific
Total Pages: 370
Release: 2011
Genre: Computers
ISBN: 9814282669

This volume covers both classical results and the most recent theoretical developments in the field of randomized search heuristics such as runtime analysis, drift analysis and convergence.

Representations for Genetic and Evolutionary Algorithms

Representations for Genetic and Evolutionary Algorithms
Author: Franz Rothlauf
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Total Pages: 335
Release: 2006-03-14
Genre: Technology & Engineering
ISBN: 3540324445

In the field of genetic and evolutionary algorithms (GEAs), a large amount of theory and empirical study has been focused on operators and test problems, while problem representation has often been taken as given. This book breaks with this tradition and provides a comprehensive overview on the influence of problem representations on GEA performance. The book summarizes existing knowledge regarding problem representations and describes how basic properties of representations, such as redundancy, scaling, or locality, influence the performance of GEAs and other heuristic optimization methods. Using the developed theory, representations can be analyzed and designed in a theory-guided matter. The theoretical concepts are used for solving integer optimization problems and network design problems more efficiently. The book is written in an easy-readable style and is intended for researchers, practitioners, and students who want to learn about representations. This second edition extends the analysis of the basic properties of representations and introduces a new chapter on the analysis of direct representations.

Metaheuristic Clustering

Metaheuristic Clustering
Author: Swagatam Das
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Total Pages: 266
Release: 2009-03-24
Genre: Computers
ISBN: 3540921729

Cluster analysis means the organization of an unlabeled collection of objects or patterns into separate groups based on their similarity. The task of computerized data clustering has been approached from diverse domains of knowledge like graph theory, multivariate analysis, neural networks, fuzzy set theory, and so on. Clustering is often described as an unsupervised learning method but most of the traditional algorithms require a prior specification of the number of clusters in the data for guiding the partitioning process, thus making it not completely unsupervised. Modern data mining tools that predict future trends and behaviors for allowing businesses to make proactive and knowledge-driven decisions, demand fast and fully automatic clustering of very large datasets with minimal or no user intervention. In this volume, we formulate clustering as an optimization problem, where the best partitioning of a given dataset is achieved by minimizing/maximizing one (single-objective clustering) or more (multi-objective clustering) objective functions. Using several real world applications, we illustrate the performance of several metaheuristics, particularly the Differential Evolution algorithm when applied to both single and multi-objective clustering problems, where the number of clusters is not known beforehand and must be determined on the run. This volume comprises of 7 chapters including an introductory chapter giving the fundamental definitions and the last Chapter provides some important research challenges. Academics, scientists as well as engineers engaged in research, development and application of optimization techniques and data mining will find the comprehensive coverage of this book invaluable.

Essays and Surveys in Metaheuristics

Essays and Surveys in Metaheuristics
Author: Celso C. Ribeiro
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Total Pages: 647
Release: 2012-12-06
Genre: Computers
ISBN: 1461515076

Finding exact solutions to many combinatorial optimization problems in busi ness, engineering, and science still poses a real challenge, despite the impact of recent advances in mathematical programming and computer technology. New fields of applications, such as computational biology, electronic commerce, and supply chain management, bring new challenges and needs for algorithms and optimization techniques. Metaheuristics are master procedures that guide and modify the operations of subordinate heuristics, to produce improved approx imate solutions to hard optimization problems with respect to more simple algorithms. They also provide fast and robust tools, producing high-quality solutions in reasonable computation times. The field of metaheuristics has been fast evolving in recent years. Tech niques such as simulated annealing, tabu search, genetic algorithms, scatter search, greedy randomized adaptive search, variable neighborhood search, ant systems, and their hybrids are currently among the most efficient and robust optimization strategies to find high-quality solutions to many real-life optimiza tion problems. A very large nmnber of successful applications of metaheuristics are reported in the literature and spread throughout many books, journals, and conference proceedings. A series of international conferences entirely devoted to the theory, applications, and computational developments in metaheuristics has been attracting an increasing number of participants, from universities and the industry.