Online model selection for restricted covariance matrix adaptation

Abstract

We focus on a variant of covariance matrix adaptation evolution strategy (CMA-ES) with a restricted covariance matrix model, namely VkD-CMA, which is aimed at reducing the internal time complexity and the adaptation time in terms of function evaluations. We tackle the shortage of the VkD-CMA—the model of the restricted covariance matrices needs to be selected beforehand. We propose a novel mechanism to adapt the model online in the VkD-CMA. It eliminates the need for advance model selection and leads to a performance competitive with or even better than the algorithm with a nearly optimal but fixed model.