Evolutionary algorithms is a class of randomized heuristics inspired by natural evolution. They are applied in many different contexts, in particular in optimization, and analysis of such algorithms has seen tremendous advances in recent years. In this book the author provides an introduction to the methods used to analyze evolutionary algorithms and other randomized search heuristics. He starts with an algorithmic and modular perspective and gives guidelines for the design of evolutionary algorithms. He then places the approach in the broader research context with a chapter on theoretical perspectives. By adopting a complexity-theoretical perspective, he derives general limitations for black-box optimization, yielding lower bounds on the performance of evolutionary algorithms, and then develops general methods for deriving upper and lower bounds step by step. This main part is followed by a chapter covering practical applications of these methods. The notational and mathematical basics are covered in an appendix, the results presented are derived in detail, and each chapter ends with detailed comments and pointers to further reading. So the book is a useful reference for both graduate students and researchers engaged with the theoretical analysis of such algorithms.

Despite decades of work in evolutionary algorithms, there remains an uncertainty as to the relative benefits and detriments of using recombination or mutation. This book provides a characterization of the roles that recombination and mutation play in evolutionary algorithms. It integrates important prior work and introduces new theoretical techniques for studying evolutionary algorithms. Consequences of the theory are explored and a novel method for comparing search and optimization algorithms is introduced. The focus allows the book to bridge multiple communities, including evolutionary biologists and population geneticists.

A clear and lucid bottom-up approach to the basic principles of evolutionary algorithms Evolutionary algorithms (EAs) are a type of artificial intelligence. EAs are motivated by optimization processes that we observe in nature, such as natural selection, species migration, bird swarms, human culture, and ant colonies. This book discusses the theory, history, mathematics, and programming of evolutionary optimization algorithms. Featured algorithms include genetic algorithms, genetic programming, ant colony optimization, particle swarm optimization, differential evolution, biogeography-based optimization, and many others. Evolutionary Optimization Algorithms: Provides a straightforward, bottom-up approach that assists the reader in obtaining a clear but theoretically rigorous understanding of evolutionary algorithms, with an emphasis on implementation Gives a careful treatment of recently developed EAs including opposition-based learning, artificial fish swarms, bacterial foraging, and many others and discusses their similarities and differences from more well-established EAs Includes chapter-end problems plus a solutions manual available online for instructors Offers simple examples that provide the reader with an intuitive understanding of the theory Features source code for the examples available on the author's website Provides advanced mathematical techniques for analyzing EAs, including Markov modeling and dynamic system modeling Evolutionary Optimization Algorithms: Biologically Inspired and Population-Based Approaches to Computer Intelligence is an ideal text for advanced undergraduate students, graduate students, and professionals involved in engineering and computer science.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Parallel Problem Solving from Nature, PPSN 2008, held in Dortmund, Germany, in September 2008. The 114 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 206 submissions. The conference covers a wide range of topics, such as evolutionary computation, quantum computation, molecular computation, neural computation, artificial life, swarm intelligence, artificial ant systems, artificial immune systems, self-organizing systems, emergent behaviors, and applications to real-world problems. The paper are organized in topical sections on formal theory, new techniques, experimental analysis, multiobjective optimization, hybrid methods, and applications.

This edited book reports on recent developments in the theory of evolutionary computation, or more generally the domain of randomized search heuristics. It starts with two chapters on mathematical methods that are often used in the analysis of randomized search heuristics, followed by three chapters on how to measure the complexity of a search heuristic: black-box complexity, a counterpart of classical complexity theory in black-box optimization; parameterized complexity, aimed at a more fine-grained view of the difficulty of problems; and the fixed-budget perspective, which answers the question of how good a solution will be after investing a certain computational budget. The book then describes theoretical results on three important questions in evolutionary computation: how to profit from changing the parameters during the run of an algorithm; how evolutionary algorithms cope with dynamically changing or stochastic environments; and how population diversity influences performance. Finally, the book looks at three algorithm classes that have only recently become the focus of theoretical work: estimation-of-distribution algorithms; artificial immune systems; and genetic programming. Throughout the book the contributing authors try to develop an understanding for how these methods work, and why they are so successful in many applications. The book will be useful for students and researchers in theoretical computer science and evolutionary computing.

Cluster analysis means the organization of an unlabeled collection of objects or patterns into separate groups based on their similarity. The task of computerized data clustering has been approached from diverse domains of knowledge like graph theory, multivariate analysis, neural networks, fuzzy set theory, and so on. Clustering is often described as an unsupervised learning method but most of the traditional algorithms require a prior specification of the number of clusters in the data for guiding the partitioning process, thus making it not completely unsupervised. Modern data mining tools that predict future trends and behaviors for allowing businesses to make proactive and knowledge-driven decisions, demand fast and fully automatic clustering of very large datasets with minimal or no user intervention. In this volume, we formulate clustering as an optimization problem, where the best partitioning of a given dataset is achieved by minimizing/maximizing one (single-objective clustering) or more (multi-objective clustering) objective functions. Using several real world applications, we illustrate the performance of several metaheuristics, particularly the Differential Evolution algorithm when applied to both single and multi-objective clustering problems, where the number of clusters is not known beforehand and must be determined on the run. This volume comprises of 7 chapters including an introductory chapter giving the fundamental definitions and the last Chapter provides some important research challenges. Academics, scientists as well as engineers engaged in research, development and application of optimization techniques and data mining will find the comprehensive coverage of this book invaluable.

This volume covers both classical results and the most recent theoretical developments in the field of randomized search heuristics such as runtime analysis, drift analysis and convergence.