Ecological theory provides insights about evolutionary computation

Abstract

Promoting diversity in an evolving population is important for Evolutionary Computation (EC) because it reduces premature convergence on suboptimal fitness peaks while still encouraging both exploration and exploitation [3]. However, some types of diversity facilitate finding global optima better than other types. For example, a high mutation rate may maintain high population-level diversity, but all of those genotypes are clustered in a local region of a fitness landscape. Fitness sharing [3], on the other hand, promotes diversity via negative density dependence forcing solutions apart. Lexicase selection [5] goes one step further, dynamically selecting for diverse phenotypic traits, encouraging solutions to actively represent many portions of the landscape.