Abstract
In their seminal article Droste, Jansen, and Wegener (Theor. Comput. Sci. 276:51–82, 2002) consider a basic direct-search heuristic with a global search operator, namely the so-called (1+1) Evolutionary Algorithm ((1+1) EA). They present the first theoretical analysis of the (1+1) EA’s expected runtime for the class of linear functions over the search space {0,1}n. In a rather long and involved proof they show that, for any linear function, the expected runtime is O(nlog n), i.e., that there are two constants c and n′ such that, for n≥n′, the expected number of iterations until a global optimum is generated is bounded above by c⋅nlog 2 n. However, neither c nor n′ are specified—they would be pretty large. Here we reconsider this optimization scenario to demonstrate the potential of an analytical method that makes use of the distribution of the evolving candidate solution over the search space {0,1}n. Actually, an invariance property of this distribution is proved, which is then used to obtain a significantly improved bound on the drift, namely the expected change of a potential function, here the number of bits set correctly. Finally, this better estimate of the drift enables an upper bound on the expected number of iterations of 3.8nlog 2 n+7.6log 2 n for n≥2.
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While preparing this article the author was supported by the German Research Foundation (DFG) through the collaborative research center “Computational Intelligence” (SFB 531).
This article is an expanded and extended version of A Blend of Markov-Chain and Drift Analysis presented at Parallel Problem Solving from Nature 2008 [7].
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Jägersküpper, J. Combining Markov-Chain Analysis and Drift Analysis. Algorithmica 59, 409–424 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00453-010-9396-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00453-010-9396-y