The study of epistasis based on the random walk model in fitness landscapes of schemata

Abstract

Interdependence between genes is an important factor causing hardness in genetic algorithms (GA). Traditional methods, which are used to measure the interaction between genes, can only reflect the extent of epistasis between all genes in the chromosome. In this paper, we propose the definition of the fitness landscape of schemata, and perform random walks on this landscape to study the degree of interdependence between some certain gene loci in study. According to the degree of interaction between these given gene loci, we can analyze and determine building blocks of GA. We also do a lot of experiments based on NK-models, and results of empirical analysis show that this method is effective.