Publications Details
On the application of evolutionary pattern search algorithms
This paper presents an experimental evaluation of evolutionary pattern search algorithms (EPSAs). Our experimental evaluation of EPSAs indicates that EPSAs can achieve similar performance to EAs on challenging global optimization problems. Additionally, we describe a stopping rule for EPSAs that reliably terminated them near a stationary point of the objective function. The ability for EPSAs to reliably terminate near stationary points offers a practical advantage over other EAs, which are typically stopped by heuristic stopping rules or simple bounds on the number of iterations. Our experiments also illustrate how the rate of the crossover operator can influence the tradeoff between the number of iterations before termination and the quality of the solution found by an EPSA.