Evolving NK-complexity for evolutionary solvers

In this paper we empirically investigate the structural characteristics that can help to predict the complexity of NK-landscape instances for estimation of distribution algorithms (EDAs). We evolve instances that maximize the EDA complexity in terms of its success rate. Similarly, instances that minimize the algorithm complexity are evolved. We then identify network measures, computed from the structures of the NK-landscape instances, that have a statistically significant difference between the set of easy and hard instances. The features identified are consistently significant for different values of $N$ and $K$.