title: Adaptive Parent Population Sizing in Evolution Strategies.
abstract: Adaptive population sizing aims at improving the overall progress of an evolution strategy. At each generation, it determines the parental population size that promises the largest fitness gain, based on the information collected during the evolutionary process. In this paper, we develop an adaptive variant of a (μ/μ, λ) evolution strategy. Based on considerations on the sphere, we derive two approaches for adaptive population sizing. We then test these approaches empirically on the sphere model using a normalized mutation strength and cumulative mutation strength adaption. Finally, we compare the methodology on more general functions with a fixed population, covariance matrix adaption evolution strategy (CMA-ES). The results confirm that our adaptive population sizing methods yield better results than even the best fixed population size.
authors.affiliation: Department of Mathematical Sciences, United States Military Academy, West Point, NY 10996, USA jake.laporte@usma.edu.
authors.forename: G Jake
authors.initials: GJ
authors.lastname: LaPorte
authors.affiliation: Warwick Business School, The University of Warwick, Coventry, CV4 7AL, UK juergen.branke@wbs.ac.uk.
authors.forename: Juergen
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Branke
authors.affiliation: Department of Systems Engineering and Operations Research, George Mason University, Fairfax, VA 22030, USA cchen9@gmu.edu.
authors.forename: Chun-Hung
authors.initials: CH
authors.lastname: Chen
mesh_terms: D000465:Algorithms; D005075:Biological Evolution; D008962:Models, Theoretical; D011156:Population Density
keywords: Evolution strategy; adaptive population sizing; parental population size