Structural bias in population-based algorithms
Abstract Challenging optimisation problems are abundant in all areas of science and industry. Since the 1950s, scientists have responded to this by developing ever-diversifying families of ‘black box’ optimisation algorithms. The latter are designed to be able to address any optimisation problem, requiring only that the quality of any candidate solution can be calculated via a ‘fitness function’ specific to the problem. For such algorithms to be successful, at least three properties are required: (i) an effective informed sampling strategy, that guides the generation of new candidates on the basis of the fitnesses and locations of previously visited candidates; (ii) mechanisms to ensure eff…
Differential Evolution with Scale Factor Local Search for Large Scale Problems
This chapter proposes the integration of fitness diversity adaptation techniques within the parameter setting of Differential Evolution (DE). The scale factor and crossover rate are encoded within each genotype and self-adaptively updated during the evolution by means of a probabilistic criterion which takes into account the diversity properties of the entire population. The population size is also adaptively controlled by means of a novel technique based on a measurement of the fitness diversity. An extensive experimental setup has been implemented by including multivariate problems and hard to solve fitness landscapes. A comparison of the performance has been conducted by considering a st…