Ruffled by Ridges: How Evolutionary Algorithms Can Fail

The representations currently used by local search and some evolutionary algorithms have the disadvantage that these algorithms are partially blind to “ridges” in the search space. Both heuristics search and gradient search algorithms can exhibit extremely slow convergence on functions that display ridge structures. A class of rotated representations are proposed and explored; these rotated representations can be based on Principal Components Analysis, or use the Gram-Schmidt orthogonalization method. Some algorithms, such as CMA-ES, already make use of similar rotated representations.

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