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Paper details
Number 3 - September 2004
Volume 14 - 2004
Phenotypic evolution with a mutation based on symmetric α-stable distributions
Andrzej Obuchowicz, Przemysław Prętki
Abstract
Multidimensional Symmetric α-Stable (SαS) mutations are applied to phenotypic evolutionary algorithms. Such mutations are characterized by non-spherical symmetry for α < 2 and the fact that the most probable distance of mutated points is not in a close neighborhood of the origin, but at a certain distance from it. It is the so-called surrounding effect (Obuchowicz, 2001b; 2003b). For α = 2, the SαS mutation reduces to the Gaussian one, and in the case of α = 1, the Cauchy mutation is obtained. The exploration and exploitation abilities of evolutionary algorithms, using SαS mutations for different α, are analyzed by a set of simulation experiments. The obtained results prove the important influence of the surrounding effect of symmetric α-stable mutations on both the abilities considered.
Keywords
evolutionary algorithms, Lévy-stable distributions, global optimization, surrounding effect