Using fitness distributions to improve the evolution of learning structures

The absolute benefit, a measure of improvement in the fitness space, is derived from the viewpoint of fitness distribution and fitness trajectory analysis. It is used for online operator adaptation, where the optimization of density estimation models serves as an example. A new information theory based measure is proposed to judge the accuracy of the evolved models. Further, the absolute benefit is applied to offline analysis of new gradient based operators used for coefficient adaptation in genetic programming. An efficient method to calculate the gradient information is presented.