Self-adaptation of mutation distribution in evolutionary algorithms

This paper proposes a self-adaptation method to control not only the mutation strength parameter, but also the mutation distribution for evolutionary algorithms. For this purpose, the isotropic q-Gaussian distribution is employed in the mutation operator. The q-Gaussian distribution allows to control the shape of the distribution by setting a real parameter q and can reproduce either finite second moment distributions or infinite second moment distributions. In the proposed method, the real parameter q of the q-Gaussian distribution is encoded in the chromosome of an individual and is allowed to evolve. An evolutionary programming algorithm with the proposed idea is presented. Experiments were carried out to study the performance of the proposed algorithm.