The Effect of Multi-Parent Recombination on Evolution Strategies for Noisy Objective Functions

Abstract

In this chapter we apply (m / m, l)-ES to noisy test functions, in order to investigate the effect of multi-parent versions of both intermediate recombination and discrete recombination. Among the many formulations of ES, we test three in particular; Classical-ES (CES), i.e., Schwefel’s original ES (Schwefel, 1995, Bäck, 1996); Fast-ES (FES), i.e., Yao and Liu’s extended ES (Yao & Liu, 1997); and Robust-ES (RES), i.e., our extended ES (Ohkura, 2001). Computer simulations are used to compare the performance of multi-parent versions of intermediate recombination and discrete recombination in CES, FES and RES. We saw that the performance of the (m / m, l)-ES algorithms depended on the particular objective functions. However, the FES and RES algorithms were seen to be improved by multi-parent versions of discrete recombination applied to both object parameters and strategy parameters.