arXiv subjects
Publications and source records attributed to Ricard Caballero.
We study the law of the minimum of a Brownian bridge, conditioned to take specific values at specific points, and the law of the location of the minimum. They are used to compare some non-adaptive optimisation algorithms for black-box functions for which the Brownian bridge is an appropriate probabilistic model and only a few points can be sampled.
No-Free-Lunch Theorems state, roughly speaking, that the performance of all search algorithms is the same when averaged over all possible objective functions. This fact was precisely formulated for the first time in a now famous paper by Wolpert and Macready, and then subsequently refined and extended by several authors, always in the context of a set of functions with discrete domain and codomain. Recently, Auger and Teytaud have shown that for continuum domains there is typically no No-Free-Lunch theorems. In this paper we provide another approach, which is simpler, requires less assumptions, relates the discrete and continuum cases, and that we believe that clarifies the role of the cardinality and structure of the domain.