Search results for "Local optima networks"
showing 3 items of 3 documents
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…
Determining the Difficulty of Landscapes by PageRank Centrality in Local Optima Networks
2016
The contribution of this study is twofold: First, we show that we can predict the performance of Iterated Local Search (ILS) in different landscapes with the help of Local Optima Networks (LONs) with escape edges. As a predictor, we use the PageRank Centrality of the global optimum. Escape edges can be extracted with lower effort than the edges used in a previous study. Second, we show that the PageRank vector of a LON can be used to predict the solution quality (average fitness) achievable by ILS in different landscapes.
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…