New Ways to Calibrate Evolutionary Algorithms

The issue of setting the values of various parameters of an evolutionary algorithm (EA) is crucial for good performance. One way to do it is controlling EA parameters on-the-fly, which can be done in various ways and for various parameters. We briefly review these options in general and present the findings of a literature search and some statistics about the most popular options. Thereafter, we provide three case studies indicating a high potential for uncommon variants. In particular, we recommend to focus on parameters regulating selection and population size, rather than those concerning crossover and mutation. On the technical side, the case study on adjusting tournament size shows by example that global parameters can also be self-adapted, and that heuristic adaptation and pure self-adaptation can be successfully combined into a hybrid of the two.