showing 3 related works from this author
Shaping communities of local optima by perturbation strength
2017
Recent work discovered that fitness landscapes induced by Iterated Local Search (ILS) may consist of multiple clusters, denoted as funnels or communities of local optima. Such studies exist only for perturbation operators (kicks) with low strength. We examine how different strengths of the ILS perturbation operator affect the number and size of clusters. We present an empirical study based on local optima networks from NK fitness landscapes. Our results show that a properly selected perturbation strength can help overcome the effect of ILS getting trapped in clusters of local optima. This has implications for designing effective ILS approaches in practice, where traditionally only small per…
Communities of Local Optima as Funnels in Fitness Landscapes
2016
We conduct an analysis of local optima networks extracted from fitness landscapes of the Kauffman NK model under iterated local search. Applying the Markov Cluster Algorithm for community detection to the local optima networks, we find that the landscapes consist of multiple clusters. This result complements recent findings in the literature that landscapes often decompose into multiple funnels, which increases their difficulty for iterated local search. Our results suggest that the number of clusters as well as the size of the cluster in which the global optimum is located are correlated to the search difficulty of landscapes. We conclude that clusters found by community detection in local…
Coarse-Grained Barrier Trees of Fitness Landscapes
2016
Recent literature suggests that local optima in fitness landscapes are clustered, which offers an explanation of why perturbation-based metaheuristics often fail to find the global optimum: they become trapped in a sub-optimal cluster. We introduce a method to extract and visualize the global organization of these clusters in form of a barrier tree. Barrier trees have been used to visualize the barriers between local optima basins in fitness landscapes. Our method computes a more coarsely grained tree to reveal the barriers between clusters of local optima. The core element is a new variant of the flooding algorithm, applicable to local optima networks, a compressed representation of fitnes…