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arXiv · 1902.02588

Self-Adjusting Mutation Rates with Provably Optimal Success Rules

Benjamin Doerr·Carola Doerr·Johannes Lengler
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Abstract

The one-fifth success rule is one of the best-known and most widely accepted techniques to control the parameters of evolutionary algorithms. While it is often applied in the literal sense, a common interpretation sees the one-fifth success rule as a family of success-based updated rules that are determined by an update strength $F$ and a success rate. We analyze in this work how the performance of the (1+1) Evolutionary Algorithm on LeadingOnes depends on these two hyper-parameters. Our main result shows that the best performance is obtained for small update strengths $F=1+o(1)$ and success rate $1/e$. We also prove that the running time obtained by this parameter setting is, apart from lower order terms, the same that is achieved with the best fitness-dependent mutation rate. We show similar results for the resampling variant of the (1+1) Evolutionary Algorithm, which enforces to flip at least one bit per iteration.

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Benjamin Doerr, Carola Doerr, Johannes Lengler. 2019-02-07. Self-Adjusting Mutation Rates with Provably Optimal Success Rules. https://arxiv.org/abs/1902.02588

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