Home Scope Program Downloads Contact - Announcements - GECCO-2004       - main       - workshops OBUPM 2001 OBUPM 2000

OBUPM 2004 - Home

Optimization by Building and Using Probabilistic Models 2004 OBUPM 2004 Organized by: Martin Pelikan, Kumara Sastry, and Dirk Thierens Genetic and evolutionary algorithms (GEAs) evolve a population of candidate solutions to a given optimization problem using two basic operators: (1) selection and (2) variation. Selection introduces a pressure toward high-quality solutions, whereas variation ensures exploration of the space of all potential solutions. Two variation operators are common in current genetic and evolutionary computation (GEC): (1) crossover, and (2) mutation. Crossover creates new candidate solutions by combining bits and pieces of promising solutions, whereas mutation introduces slight perturbations to promising solutions to explore their immediate neighborhood. However, fixed, problem independent variation operators often fail to effectively exploit important features of high-quality solutions obtained by selection. One way to make variation operators more powerful and flexible is to replace traditional variation of GEAs by the following two steps: Build a probabilistic model of the selected promising solutions, and sample the built model to generate a new population of candidate solutions. Algorithms based on this principle are called probabilistic model-building genetic algorithms (PMBGAs), estimation of distribution algorithms (EDAs), or iterated density estimation algorithms (IDEAs). The purpose of this workshop is to present and discuss recent advances in PMBGAs, new theoretical and empirical results, applications of PMBGAs, and promising directions for future PMBGA research.\item Attendance Attendance to the workshop is open to all GECCO-2004 attendees. GECCO-2004 is a joint meeting of the 9th Annual Genetic Programming Conference (GP-2004) and the International Conference on Genetic Algorithms (ICGA-2004). The conference is administered by the Amercian Association for Artificial Intelligence, 445 Burgess Drive, Menlo Park, CA 94025 USA. Phone: 650-328-3123. Fax: 650-321-4457. GECCO-2004 is operated by the International Society for Genetic Algorithms, Inc., a Massachusetts not-for-profit corporation and Genetic Programming, Inc., a California Corporation. GECCO-2004 is a the largest and most inclusive conference in the field of genetic and evolutionary computation. For more information on GECCO-2004, please visit the home-page at http://gal4.ge.uiuc.edu:8080/GECCO-2004/ Last update: Sat Oct 25 15:52:34 CDT 2003 by Martin Pelikan