Approximating the distribution of fitness over hamming regions
Andrew M. Sutton, Darrell Whitley, Adele E. Howe · 2011
The distribution of fitness values across a set of states sharply influences the dynamics of evolutionary processes and heuristic search in combinatorial optimization. In this paper we present a method for approximating the distribution of fitness values over Hamming regions by solving a linear programming problem that incorporates low order moments of the target function. These moments can be retrieved in polynomial time for select problems such as MAX-k-SAT using Walsh analysis. The method is applicable to any real function on binary strings that is epistatically bounded and discrete with asymptotic bounds on the cardinality of its codomain.