Anticipation versus Adaptation in Evolutionary Algorithms: The case of Non-Stationary Clustering

From the technological point of view is usually more important to ensure the ability to react promptly to changing environmental conditions than to try to forecast them. Evolution Algorithms were proposed initially to drive the adaptation of complex systems to varying or uncertain environments. In the general setting, the adaptive-anticipatory dilemma reduces itself to the placement of the interaction with the environment in the computational schema. Adaptation consists of the estimation of the proper parameters from present data in order to react to a present environment situation. Anticipation consists of the estimation from present data in order to react to a future environment situation. This duality is expressed in the Evolutionary Computation paradigm by the precise location of the consideration of present data in the computation of the individuals fitness function. In this paper we consider several instances of Evolutionary Algorithms applied to precise problem and perform an experiment that test their response as anticipative and adaptive mechanisms. The non stationary problem considered is that of Non Stationary Clustering, more precisely the adaptive Color Quantization of image sequences. The experiment illustrates our ideas and gives some quantitative results that may support the proposition of the Evolutionary Computation paradigm for other tasks that require the interaction with a Non-Stationary environment.