skip to main content
10.1145/1389095.1389169acmconferencesArticle/Chapter ViewAbstractPublication PagesgeccoConference Proceedingsconference-collections
research-article

On the effectiveness of distributions estimated by probabilistic model building

Published: 12 July 2008 Publication History

Abstract

Estimation of distribution algorithms (EDAs) are a class of evolutionary algorithms that capture the likely structure of promising solutions by explicitly building a probabilistic model and utilize the built model to guide the further search. It is presumed that EDAs can detect the structure of the problem by recognizing the regularities of the promising solutions. However, in certain situations, EDAs are unable to discover the entire structure of the problem because the set of promising solutions on which the model is built contains insufficient information regrading some parts of the problem and renders EDAs incapable of processing those parts accurately. In this work, we firstly propose a general concept that the estimated probabilistic models should be inspected to reveal the effective search directions. Based on that concept, we design a practical approach which utilizes a reserved set of solutions to examine the built model for the fragments that may be inconsistent with the actual problem structure. Furthermore, we provide an implementation of the designed approach on the extended compact genetic algorithm (ECGA) and conduct numerical experiments. The experimental results indicate that the proposed method can significantly assist ECGA to handle problems comprising building blocks of disparate scalings.

References

[1]
S. Baluja. Population-based incremental learning: A method for integrating genetic search based function optimization and competitive learning. Technical report, Pittsburgh, PA, USA, 1994.
[2]
S. Baluja and S. Davies. Using optimal dependency-trees for combinational optimization. In Proceedings of the 4th ICML, pages 30--38, 1997.
[3]
T. M. Cover and J. A. Thomas. Elements of information theory. Wiley-Interscience, 1991.
[4]
J. de Bonet, C. Isbell, and P. Viola. MIMIC: Finding optima by estimating probability densities. Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, 9:424--430.
[5]
R. Etxeberria and P. Larrañaga. Global optimization using bayesian networks. In Proceedings of the 2nd Symp. on Artificial Intelligence, pages 332--339, 1999.
[6]
D. E. Goldberg. Genetic Algorithms in Search, Optimization and Machine Learning. Addison-Wesley, Boston, MA, USA, 1989.
[7]
D. E. Goldberg. The Design of Innovation: Lessons from and for Competent Genetic Algorithms. Kluwer Academic Publishers, Norwell, MA, USA, 2002.
[8]
D. E. Goldberg, K. Deb, and J. H. Clark. Genetic algorithms, noise, and the sizing of populations. Complex Systems, 6(4):333--362, 1992.
[9]
D. E. Goldberg, K. Deb, and B. Korb. Messy genetic algorithms revisited: Studies in mixed size and scale. Complex Systems, 4(4):415--444, 1990.
[10]
D. E. Goldberg and M. Rudnick. Genetic algorithms and the variance of fitness. Complex Systems, 5(3):265--278, 1991.
[11]
G. Harik. Linkage learning via probabilistic modeling in the ECGA. Technical Report 99010, Illinois Genetic Algorithms Laboratory, UIUC, IL, USA, 1999.
[12]
G. R. Harik, F. G. Lobo, and D. E. Goldberg. The compact genetic algorithm. IEEE Transactions on Evolutionary Computation, 3(4):287, 1999.
[13]
J. H. Holland. Adaptation in natural and artificial systems. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, USA, 1992.
[14]
F. G. Lobo, D. E. Goldberg, and M. Pelikan. Time complexity of genetic algorithms on exponentially scaled problems. In Proceedings of GECCO-2000, pages 151--158, 2000.
[15]
T. M. Mitchell. Machine Learning. McGraw-Hill Higher Education, 1997.
[16]
H. Muhlenbein and R. H¨ons. The estimation of distributions and the minimum relative entropy principle. Evolutionary Computation, 13(1):1--27, 2005.
[17]
H. Muhlenbein and G. Paaß. From recombination of genes to the estimation of distributions I. binary parameters. In Proceedings of PPSN IV, 1996.
[18]
M. Pelikan, D. E. Goldberg, and E. Cantu-Paz. BOA: The Bayesian optimization algorithm. In Proceedings of GECCO-99, pages 525--532, 1999.
[19]
M. Pelikan and H. Muhlenbein. The bivariate marginal distribution algorithm. In Advances in Soft Computing, pages 521--535, 1999.
[20]
D. Thierens, D. E. Goldberg, and ÆA. G. Pereira. Domino convergence, drift and the temporal salience structure of problems. In Proceedings of ICEC '98, pages 535--540, 1998.

Cited By

View all
  • (2014)Estimation of distribution algorithms based on n-gramstatistics for sequencing and optimizationProceedings of the Companion Publication of the 2014 Annual Conference on Genetic and Evolutionary Computation10.1145/2598394.2598399(53-54)Online publication date: 12-Jul-2014
  • (2014)Evolving Mixtures of n-gram Models for Sequencing and Schedule OptimizationParallel Problem Solving from Nature – PPSN XIII10.1007/978-3-319-10762-2_31(312-321)Online publication date: 2014
  • (2008)The Impact of Exact Probabilistic Learning Algorithms in EDAs Based on Bayesian NetworksLinkage in Evolutionary Computation10.1007/978-3-540-85068-7_6(109-139)Online publication date: 2008

Index Terms

  1. On the effectiveness of distributions estimated by probabilistic model building

      Recommendations

      Comments

      Information & Contributors

      Information

      Published In

      cover image ACM Conferences
      GECCO '08: Proceedings of the 10th annual conference on Genetic and evolutionary computation
      July 2008
      1814 pages
      ISBN:9781605581309
      DOI:10.1145/1389095
      • Conference Chair:
      • Conor Ryan,
      • Editor:
      • Maarten Keijzer
      Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

      Sponsors

      Publisher

      Association for Computing Machinery

      New York, NY, United States

      Publication History

      Published: 12 July 2008

      Permissions

      Request permissions for this article.

      Check for updates

      Author Tags

      1. ECGA
      2. EDAS
      3. effective distribution
      4. estimation of distribution algorithms
      5. evolutionary computation
      6. extended compact genetic algorithm
      7. model pruning
      8. sensible linkage

      Qualifiers

      • Research-article

      Conference

      GECCO08
      Sponsor:

      Acceptance Rates

      Overall Acceptance Rate 1,669 of 4,410 submissions, 38%

      Contributors

      Other Metrics

      Bibliometrics & Citations

      Bibliometrics

      Article Metrics

      • Downloads (Last 12 months)54
      • Downloads (Last 6 weeks)0
      Reflects downloads up to 08 Mar 2025

      Other Metrics

      Citations

      Cited By

      View all
      • (2014)Estimation of distribution algorithms based on n-gramstatistics for sequencing and optimizationProceedings of the Companion Publication of the 2014 Annual Conference on Genetic and Evolutionary Computation10.1145/2598394.2598399(53-54)Online publication date: 12-Jul-2014
      • (2014)Evolving Mixtures of n-gram Models for Sequencing and Schedule OptimizationParallel Problem Solving from Nature – PPSN XIII10.1007/978-3-319-10762-2_31(312-321)Online publication date: 2014
      • (2008)The Impact of Exact Probabilistic Learning Algorithms in EDAs Based on Bayesian NetworksLinkage in Evolutionary Computation10.1007/978-3-540-85068-7_6(109-139)Online publication date: 2008

      View Options

      Login options

      View options

      PDF

      View or Download as a PDF file.

      PDF

      eReader

      View online with eReader.

      eReader

      Figures

      Tables

      Media

      Share

      Share

      Share this Publication link

      Share on social media