General framework for evolutionary activity

Abstract

Evolutionary activity statistics have been used to visualize and quantify the adaptive evolutionary dynamics in a wide variety of artificial and natural evolving systems, but the formalism for the statistics has evolved over the years. Furthermore, the statistics can be applied to many different aspects of an evolving system, and application in any given context requires settling certain choices. In addition, the statistics involve normalization with a special-purpose "neutral" system, which requires making even more choices. So, to help make these statistics easier to use and understand, we situate them in a new and more general formal framework and then show how this framework applies to earlier work with the statistics.