On the importance of diversity maintenance in estimation of distribution algorithms

The development of Estimation of Distribution Algorithms (EDAs) has largely been driven by using more and more complex statistical models to approximate the structure of search space. However, there are still problems that are difficult for EDAs even with models capable of capturing high order dependences. In this paper, we show that diversity maintenance plays an important role in the performance of EDAs. A continuous EDA based on the Cholesky decomposition is tested on some well-known difficult benchmark problems to demonstrate how different diversity maintenance approaches could be applied to substantially improve its performance