A condition for the genotype-phenotype mapping: Causality

TL;DR

This paper introduces a measure to evaluate the causality-preserving quality of genotype-phenotype mappings, aiming to improve evolutionary search effectiveness by maintaining neighborhood structures.

Contribution

It proposes a novel causality measure for genotype-phenotype mappings and demonstrates its application in optimizing mutation operators and parameter settings.

Findings

The measure effectively assesses the preservation of neighborhood relations.

Applying the measure improves the choice of mappings and mutation operators.

Strongly causal mappings enhance evolutionary search performance.

Abstract

The appropriate choice of the genotype-phenotype mapping in combination with the mutation operator is important for a successful evolutionary search process. We suggest a measure to quantify the quality of this combination by addressing the question whether the relation among distances is carried over from one space to the other. Search processes which do not destroy the neighbourhood structure are termed strongly causal. We apply the proposed measure to parameter and structure optimisation problems in order to assess the combination (mapping, mutation operator) and at the same time to be able to propose improved settings.