On the mutual information as a fitness landscape measure

Fitness landscape analysis plays an important role in both theoretical and practical perspectives when using evolutionary algorithms. In this paper, we develop a new measure based on the mutual information paradigm and we show how it can help to deduce further information about the fitness landscape. In order to validate it as a valuable source of information when conducting fitness landscape analysis, we investigate its properties on a well-known benchmark suite. Moreover, we investigate the usefulness of the obtained information when choosing crossover operators. Finally, we show that when using our new measure, a number of classifiers can be constructed that offer an improved accuracy.