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Table 2 EDAs taxonomy

From: A review of estimation of distribution algorithms in bioinformatics

Statistical order

Advantages

Disadvantages

Examples

Univariate

Simplest and fastest

Ignore feature dependencies

PBIL (Baluja, 1994)

 

Suited for high cardinality problems

Bad performance for deceptive problems

UMDA (Mühlenbein and Paaß, 1996)

 

Scalable

 

cGA (Harik et al., 1999)

Bivariate (statistics of order two)

Able to represent low order dependencies

Possibly ignore some feature dependencies

MIMIC (De Bonet et al., 1996)

 

Suited for many problems

Slower than univariate EDAs

Dependency trees EDA (Baluja and Davies, 1997) BMDA (Pelikan and Mühlenbein, 1999)

 

Graphically inquire the induced models

 

Tree-EDA/Mixture of distributions EDA (Santana et al., 1999)

Multivariate (statistics of order greater than two)

Parameter learning (only interaction model parameters)

 

Suited for problems with known underlying model

Possibly ignore complex feature dependencies

FDA (Mühlenbein et al., 1999)

  

Higher memory requirements than bivariate

Markov network-based EDA (Shakya and McCall, 2007)

 

Structure+parameter learning (interaction model & parameters of the model)

 

Maximum power of generalization

Highest computation time

EcGA (Harik et al., 1999)

 

Flexibility to introduce user dependencies

Highest memory requirements

EBNA (Etxeberria and Larrañaga, 1999)

 

Online study of the induced dependencies

 

BOA/hBOA (Pelikan et al., 1999, 2005)

   

Dependency networks EDA (Gámez et al., 2007)

  1. A taxonomy of some representative EDAs. We highlight a set of characteristics that can guide the choice of a particular EDA suited to the goals and properties of a given problem.