Analysis of properties of recombination operators proposed for the node-depth encoding
The node-depth encoding is a representation for evolutionary algorithms applied to tree problems. Its represents trees by storing the nodes and their depth in a proper ordered list. The original formulation of the node-depth encoding has only mutation operators as the search mechanism. Although it is computationally efficient, the exclusive use of mutation restricts the exploration of the search space and the algorithm convergence. Then, this work proposes two specific recombination operators to improve the convergence of the algorithm using the node-depth encoding representation. These operators are based on recombination operators for permutation representations. Analysis of the proposed …
The node-depth encoding
The node-depth encoding has elements from direct and indirect encoding for trees which encodes trees by storing the depth of nodes in a list. Node-depth encoding applies specific search operators that is a typical characteristic for direct encodings. An investigation into the bias of the initialization process and the mutation operators of the node-depth encoding shows that the initialization process has a bias to solutions with small depths and diameters, and a bias towards stars. This investigation, also, shows that the mutation operators are unbiased. The performance of node-depth encoding is investigated for the bounded-diameter minimum spanning tree problem. The results are presented f…