Evolutionary Continuous Optimization by Distribution Estimation with Variational Bayesian Independent Component Analyzers Mixture Model

In evolutionary continuous optimization by building and using probabilistic models, the multivariate Gaussian distribution and their variants or extensions such as the mixture of Gaussians have been used popularly. However, this Gaussian assumption is often violated in many real problems. In this paper, we propose a new continuous estimation of distribution algorithms (EDAs) with the variational Bayesian independent component analyzers mixture model (vbICA-MM) for allowing any distribution to be modeled. We examine how this sophisticated density estimation technique has influence on the performance of the optimization by employing the same selection and population alternation schemes used in the previous EDAs. Our experimental results support that the presented EDAs achieve better performance than previous EDAs with ICA and Gaussian mixtureor kernel-based approaches.