Abstract

The appropriate choice of the genotype ! phenotype mapping in combination with the mutation operator is important for a successful evolutionary search process. We suggest a measure to quantify the quality of this combination by addressing the question whether the relation among distances is carried over from one space to the other. Search processes which do not destroy the neighbourhood structure are termed strongly causal. We apply the proposed measure to parameter and structure optimisation problems in order to assess the combination (mapping, mutation operator) and at the same time to be able to propose improved settings. 1 Introduction The optimisation process in evolutionary algorithms is largely influenced by the mapping from the genotype space to the phenotype space. Especially for structure optimisation problems a measure of the quality of the combination (mapping, mutation, crossover) would be desirable. In this paper we propose such a measure based upon the ob...

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