A niching scheme for EDAs to reduce spurious dependencies
Po-Chun Hsu, Tian–Li Yu · 2013
This paper proposes a niching scheme, the dependency structure matrix restricted tournament replacement (DSMRTR). The restricted tournament replacement (RTR) is a well-known niching scheme in the field of estimation of distribution algorithms (EDAs). However, RTR induces spurious dependencies among variables, which impair the performance of EDAs. This paper utilizes building-block-wise distances to define a new distance metric, the one-niche distance. For those EDAs which provide explicit linkage information, the one-niche distances can be directly incorporated into RTR. For EDAs without such information, DSMRTR constructs a dependency structure matrix via the differential mutual complement to estimate the one-niche distances. Empirical results show that DSMRTR induces fewer spurious dependencies than RTR does while maintaining enough diversity for EDAs.