An Efficient Elitist Covariance Matrix Adaptation for Continuous Local Search in High Dimension

Zhenhua Li, Jingda Deng, Weifeng Gao, Qingfu Zhang, Hai-Lin Liu

Abstract: In this paper, we propose a computationally efficient variant of elitist covariance matrix evolution strategy for continuous local search in high dimensional space. It focuses on searching in a low-dimensional subspace expanded by a small number of promising search directions. This leads to the linear internal computational complexity of each iteration, which enables the algorithm to scale to high dimensional problems. We conduct comprehensive experiments to evaluate the parameter sensitivity and the algorithm’s performance. The experimental results validate that the proposed algorithm reduces the running time by a factor of ten, and it can be easily scaled up to n>1000 on a set of commonly used test functions.