Exploratory Landscape Analysis of Continuous Space Optimization Problems Using Information Content

Data-driven analysis methods, such as the information content of a fitness sequence, characterize a discrete fitness landscape by quantifying its smoothness, ruggedness, or neutrality. However, enhancements to the information content method are required when dealing with continuous fitness landscapes. One typically employed adaptation is to sample the fitness landscape using random walks with variable step size. However, this adaptation has significant limitations: random walks may produce biased samples, and uncertainty is added because the distance between observations is not accounted for. In this paper, we introduce a robust information content-based method for continuous fitness landscapes, which addresses these limitations. Our method generates four measures related to the landscape features. Numerical simulations are used to evaluate the efficacy of the proposed method. We calculate the Pearson correlation coefficient between the new measures and other well-known exploratory landscape analysis measures. Significant differences on the measures between benchmark functions are subsequently identified. We then demonstrate the practical relevance of the new measures using them as class predictors on a machine learning model, which classifies the benchmark functions into five groups. Classification accuracy greater than 90% was obtained, with computational costs bounded between 1% and 10% of the maximum function evaluation budget. The results demonstrate that our method provides relevant information, at a low cost in terms of function evaluations.