Relaxing Consensus in Distributed Factored Evolutionary Algorithms
Stephyn Butcher, Shane Strasser, Jenna Hoole, Benjamin DeMeo, John W. Sheppard · 2016
Factored Evolutionary Algorithms (FEA) have proven to be fast and efficient optimization methods, often outperforming established methods using single populations. One restriction to FEA is that it requires a central communication point between all of the factors, making FEA difficult to use in completely distributed settings. The Distributed Factored Evolutionary Algorithm (DFEA) relaxes this requirement on central communication by having neighboring factors communicate directly with one another. While DFEA has been effective at finding good solutions, there is often an increase in computational complexity due to the communication between factors. In previous work on DFEA, the authors required the algorithm reach full consensus between factors during communication. In this paper, we demonstrate that even without full consensus, the performance of DFEA was not statistically different on problems with low epistasis. Additionally, we found that there is a relationship between the convergence of consensus between factors and the convergence of fitness of DFEA.