Introduction to Estimation of Distribution Algorithms

Estimation of distribution algorithms (EDAs) guide the search for the optimum by building and sampling explicit probabilistic models of promising candidate solutions. However, EDAs are not only optimization techniques; besides the optimum or its approximation, EDAs provide practitioners with a series of probabilistic models that reveal a lot of information about the problem being solved. This information can in turn be used to design problem-specific neighborhood operators for local search, to bias future runs of EDAs on a similar problem, or to create an efficient computational model of the problem. This chapter provides an introduction to EDAs as well as a number of pointers for obtaining more information about this class of algorithms.