Futility-Based Offspring Sizing

Author

Andre Nwamba
Daniel R. Tauritz, Missouri University of Science and TechnologyFollow

Abstract

Parameter control in evolutionary algorithms (EAs) has been shown to be beneficial; however, the control of offspring size has so far received very little attention. This paper introduces Futility-Based Offspring Sizing (FuBOS), a method for controlling offspring size on a per generation basis without even requiring the user to set an initial offspring size value. We show that on several complex problems, an EA employing FuBOS performs on par with a highly tuned, fixed offspring size EA while being far more efficient in terms of fitness evaluations and much easier to tune as well.

Recommended Citation

A. Nwamba and D. R. Tauritz, "Futility-Based Offspring Sizing," Proceedings of the 11th Annual Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference, GECCO-2009, pp. 1873 - 1874, Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), Jan 2009.

The definitive version is available at https://doi.org/10.1145/1569901.1570210

Meeting Name

11th Annual Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference, GECCO-2009 (2009: Jul. 8-12, Montreal, Quebec, Canada)

Department(s)

Computer Science

Keywords and Phrases

Evolutionary Algorithm; Offspring Sizing; Optimization; Parameter Control; Parameterless Evolutionary Algorithm

International Standard Book Number (ISBN)

978-1605583259

Document Type

Article - Conference proceedings

Document Version

Citation

File Type

text

Language(s)

English

Rights

© 2009 Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), All rights reserved.

Publication Date

01 Jan 2009