Abstract
This chapter reviews and expands our work on the relationship between linkage structure, that is how decision variables of a problem are linked with (dependent on) one another, and the performance of three basic types of genetic evolutionary algorithms (GEAs): hill climbing, genetic algorithm and bottom-up self-assembly (compositional). It explores how concepts and quantitative methods from the field of social/complex networks can be used to characterize or explain problem difficulty for GEAs. It also re-introduces two novel concepts – inter-level conflict and specificity – which view linkage structure from a level perspective. In general, the basic GEAs performed well on our test problems with linkage structures resembling those empirically observed in many real-world networks. This is a positive indication that the structure of real-world networks which evolved without any central organization such as biological networks is not only influenced by evolution and therefore exhibit non-random properties, but also influences its own evolution in the sense that certain structures are easier for evolutionary forces to adapt for survival. However, this necessarily implies the difficulty of certain other structures. Hence, the need to go beyond basic GEAs to what we call GEAs with “brains”, of which linkage-learning GEAs is one species.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Albert, R., Barabási, A.-L.: Statistical mechanics of complex networks. Reviews of Modern Physics 74(1), 47–97 (2002)
Brélaz, D.: New methods to color the vertices of a graph. Communications of the ACM 22(4), 251–256 (1979)
Davidor, Y.: Epistasis variance: a viewpoint of GA-hardness. In: Foundations of Genetic Algorithms, vol. 1, pp. 23–35. Morgan Kaufmann, San Francisco (1991)
Dawkins, R.: The Selfish Gene. Oxford University Press, Oxford (2006)
Forrest, S., Mitchell, M.: Relative building-block fitness and the building-block hypothesis. In: Foundations of Genetic Algorithms, pp. 109–126. Morgan Kaufmann, San Francisco (1993)
Gomes, C., Walsh, T.: Randomness and Structure. In: Rossi, F., van Beek, P., Walsh, T. (eds.) Handbook of Constraint Programming. Elsevier, Amsterdam (2006)
Hogg, T.: Refining the phase transition in combinatorial search. Artificial Intelligence 81, 127–154 (1996)
Holland, J.H.: Adaptation in Natural and Artificial Systems. The University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor (1975)
Jones, T., Forrest, S.: Fitness Distance Correlations as a measure of problem difficulty for genetic algorithms. In: 6th International Conference on Genetic Algorithms, pp. 184–192. Morgan Kaufmann, San Francisco (1995)
Jones, T.: Evolutionary Algorithms, Fitness Landscapes and Search. PhD Dissertation, University of New Mexico, New Mexico, USA (1995)
Khor, S.: Rethinking the adaptive capability of accretive evolution on hierarchically consistent problems. In: IEEE Symposium on Artificial Life, pp. 409–416. IEEE Press, Los Alamitos (2007)
Khor, S.: HIFF-II: A hierarchically decomposable problem with inter-level interdependency. In: IEEE Symposium on Artificial Life, pp. 274–281. IEEE Press, Los Alamitos (2007)
Khor, S.: How different hierarchical relationships impact evolution. In: Randall, M., Abbass, H.A., Wiles, J. (eds.) ACAL 2007. LNCS (LNAI), vol. 4828, pp. 119–130. Springer, Heidelberg (2007)
Khor, S.: Problem Structure and Evolutionary Algorithm Difficulty. Ph.D. Dissertation, Concordia University, Montreal, Canada (2008)
Khor, S.: Where genetic drift, crossover and mutation play nice in a free-mixing single-population genetic algorithm. In: IEEE World Congress on Computational Intelligence, pp. 62–69. IEEE Press, Los Alamitos (2008)
Khor, S.: Exploring the influence of problem structural characteristics on evo-lutionary algorithm performance. In: IEEE Congress on Evolutionary Computation, pp. 3345–3352 (2009)
Khor, S.: Effect of degree distribution on evolutionary search. In: Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference, pp. 1857–1858 (2009)
Khor, S.: Generating hierarchically modular networks via link switching. arXiv:0903.2598 (2009)
Khor, S.: Graph coloring and degree-degree correlation (2009) (Unpublished to date)
Larranga, P., Lozano, J.A.: Estimation of Distribution Algorithms: A new tool for evolutionary computation. Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dordrecht (2002)
Lenaerts, T., Defaweux, A.: Solving hierarchically decomposable problems with the Evolutionary Transition Algorithm. In: Chiong, R., Dhakal, S. (eds.) Natural intelligence for scheduling, planning and packing problems. Springer, Berlin (2009)
Mahfoud, S.: Niching Methods for Genetic Algorithms. Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Illinois (1995)
Maslov, S., Sneppen, K.: Specificity and stability in topology of protein networks. Science 296, 910–913 (2002)
Michod, R.E.: Cooperation and conflict in the evolution of complexity. In: Computational Synthesis: From basic building blocks to high level functionality: Papers from the AAAI Spring Symposium: 3–10. Technical Report SS-03-02. The AAAI Press, Menlo Park (2003)
Mitchell, M., Forrest, S., Holland, J.H.: The Royal Road for genetic algorithms: fitness landscapes and GA performance. In: 1st European Conference on Artificial Life, pp. 245–254. MIT Press, Cambridge (1992)
Naudts, B.: Measuring GA-Hardness. Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Antwerp, Belgium (1998)
Nedelcu, A.M., Michod, R.E.: Evolvability, modularity and individuality during the transition to multicellularity in Volvocalean green algae. In: Schlosser, G., Wagner, G. (eds.) Modularity in Development and Evolution. University of Chicago Press (2003)
Newman, M.E.J.: The structure and function of complex networks. SIAM Review 45, 167–256 (2003)
Newman, M.E.J.: Modularity and community structure in networks. arXiv:physics/0602124v1 (2006)
Oikonomou, P., Cluzel, P.: Effects of topology on network evolution. Nature Physics 2, 532–536 (2006)
Pelikan, M.: Hierarchical Bayesian Optimization Algorithm: Toward a new generation of evolutionary algorithms. Springer, Heidelberg (2005)
Simon, H.A.: The Sciences of the Artificial. The MIT Press, Cambridge (1969)
Van Hoyweghen, C., Naudts, B., Goldberg, D.E.: Spin-flip symmetry and synchronization. In: Evolutionary Computation, vol. 10(4), pp. 317–344. MIT Press, Cambridge (2002)
Walsh, T.: Search in a small world. In: International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, pp. 1172–1177. Morgan Kaufmann, San Francisco (1999)
Walsh, T.: Search on high degree graphs. In: Proc. of the 17th Int. Joint Conf. on Artificial Intelligence, pp. 266–274 (2001)
Watson, R.A., Hornby, G.S., Pollack, J.B.: Modeling building-block interdependency. In: Eiben, A.E., Bäck, T., Schoenauer, M., Schwefel, H.-P. (eds.) PPSN 1998. LNCS, vol. 1498, pp. 97–108. Springer, Heidelberg (1998)
Watson, R.A.: Compositional Evolution: The Impact of sex, symbiosis and modularity on the gradualist framework of evolution. The MIT Press, Cambridge (2006)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2010 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Khor, S. (2010). Linkage Structure and Genetic Evolutionary Algorithms. In: Chen, Yp. (eds) Exploitation of Linkage Learning in Evolutionary Algorithms. Evolutionary Learning and Optimization, vol 3. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-12834-9_1
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-12834-9_1
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-642-12833-2
Online ISBN: 978-3-642-12834-9
eBook Packages: EngineeringEngineering (R0)