An Analysis and Evaluation of the Saving Capability and Feasibility of Backward-Chaining Evolutionary Algorithms

Abstract

Artificial Intelligence, volume 170, number 11, pages 953–983, 2006 published a paper titled “Backward-chaining evolutionary algorithm”. It introduced two fitness evaluation saving algorithms which are built on top of standard tournament selection. One algorithm is named Efficient Macro-selection Evolutionary Algorithm (EMS-EA) and the other is named Backward-chaining EA (BC-EA). Both algorithms were claimed to be able to provide considerable fitness evaluation savings, and especially BC-EA was claimed to be much efficient for hard and complex problems which require very large populations. This paper provides an evaluation and analysis of the two algorithms in terms of the feasibility and capability of reducing the fitness evaluation cost. The evaluation and analysis results show that BC-EA would be able to provide computational savings in unusual situations where given problems can be solved by an evolutionary algorithm using a very small tournament size, or a large tournament size but a very large population and a very small number of generations. Other than that, the saving capability of BC-EA is the same as EMS-EA. Furthermore, the feasibility of BC-EA is limited because two important assumptions making it work hardly hold.