Lower Bounds from Fitness Levels Made Easy

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Hauptverfasser: Doerr, Benjamin, Kötzing, Timo
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2021
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author Doerr, Benjamin
Kötzing, Timo
author_facet Doerr, Benjamin
Kötzing, Timo
contents One of the first and easy to use techniques for proving run time bounds for evolutionary algorithms is the so-called method of fitness levels by Wegener. It uses a partition of the search space into a sequence of levels which are traversed by the algorithm in increasing order, possibly skipping levels. An easy, but often strong upper bound for the run time can then be derived by adding the reciprocals of the probabilities to leave the levels (or upper bounds for these). Unfortunately, a similarly effective method for proving lower bounds has not yet been established. The strongest such method, proposed by Sudholt (2013), requires a careful choice of the viscosity parameters $γ_{i,j}$, $0 \le i < j \le n$. In this paper we present two new variants of the method, one for upper and one for lower bounds. Besides the level leaving probabilities, they only rely on the probabilities that levels are visited at all. We show that these can be computed or estimated without greater difficulties and apply our method to reprove the following known results in an easy and natural way. (i) The precise run time of the (1+1) EA on \textsc{LeadingOnes}. (ii) A lower bound for the run time of the (1+1) EA on \textsc{OneMax}, tight apart from an $O(n)$ term. (iii) A lower bound for the run time of the (1+1) EA on long $k$-paths. We also prove a tighter lower bound for the run time of the (1+1) EA on jump functions by showing that, regardless of the jump size, only with probability $O(2^{-n})$ the algorithm can avoid to jump over the valley of low fitness.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2104_03372
institution arXiv
publishDate 2021
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Lower Bounds from Fitness Levels Made Easy
Doerr, Benjamin
Kötzing, Timo
Neural and Evolutionary Computing
Artificial Intelligence
One of the first and easy to use techniques for proving run time bounds for evolutionary algorithms is the so-called method of fitness levels by Wegener. It uses a partition of the search space into a sequence of levels which are traversed by the algorithm in increasing order, possibly skipping levels. An easy, but often strong upper bound for the run time can then be derived by adding the reciprocals of the probabilities to leave the levels (or upper bounds for these). Unfortunately, a similarly effective method for proving lower bounds has not yet been established. The strongest such method, proposed by Sudholt (2013), requires a careful choice of the viscosity parameters $γ_{i,j}$, $0 \le i < j \le n$. In this paper we present two new variants of the method, one for upper and one for lower bounds. Besides the level leaving probabilities, they only rely on the probabilities that levels are visited at all. We show that these can be computed or estimated without greater difficulties and apply our method to reprove the following known results in an easy and natural way. (i) The precise run time of the (1+1) EA on \textsc{LeadingOnes}. (ii) A lower bound for the run time of the (1+1) EA on \textsc{OneMax}, tight apart from an $O(n)$ term. (iii) A lower bound for the run time of the (1+1) EA on long $k$-paths. We also prove a tighter lower bound for the run time of the (1+1) EA on jump functions by showing that, regardless of the jump size, only with probability $O(2^{-n})$ the algorithm can avoid to jump over the valley of low fitness.
title Lower Bounds from Fitness Levels Made Easy
topic Neural and Evolutionary Computing
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2104.03372