Hot off the Press: From Understanding the Population Dynamics of the NSGA-II to the First Proven Lower Bounds

Benjamin Doerr, Zhondi Qu

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

Abstract

Due to the more complicated population dynamics of the NSGA-II, none of the existing runtime guarantees for this algorithm is accompanied by a non-trivial lower bound. Via a first mathematical understanding of the population dynamics of the NSGA-II, that is, by estimating the expected number of individuals having a certain objective value, we prove that the NSGA-II with suitable population size needs Ω(Nnlogn) function evaluations to find the Pareto front of the OneMinMax problem and Ω(Nnk) evaluations on the OneJumpZeroJump problem with jump size k. These bounds are asymptotically tight (that is, they match previously shown upper bounds) and show that the NSGA-II here does not even in terms of the parallel runtime (number of iterations) profit from larger population sizes. For the OneJumpZeroJump problem and when the same sorting is used for the computation of the crowding distance contributions of the two objectives, we even obtain a runtime estimate that is tight including the leading constant.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationGECCO 2023 Companion - Proceedings of the 2023 Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference Companion
PublisherAssociation for Computing Machinery, Inc
Pages17-18
Number of pages2
ISBN (Electronic)9798400701207
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 15 Jul 2023
Event2023 Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference Companion, GECCO 2023 Companion - Lisbon, Portugal
Duration: 15 Jul 202319 Jul 2023

Publication series

NameGECCO 2023 Companion - Proceedings of the 2023 Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference Companion

Conference

Conference2023 Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference Companion, GECCO 2023 Companion
Country/TerritoryPortugal
CityLisbon
Period15/07/2319/07/23

Keywords

  • NSGA-II
  • multi-objective optimization
  • multimodal problems
  • runtime analysis
  • theory

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