Blocked stochastic sampling versus Estimation of Distribution Algorithms

Abstract

The Boltzmann distribution is a good candidate for a search distribution for optimization problems. We compare two methods to approximate the Boltzmann distribution - Estimation of Distribution Algorithms (EDA) and Markov Chain Monte Carlo methods (MCMC). It turns out that in the space of binary functions even blocked MCMC methods outperform EDA on a small class of problems only. In these cases a temperature of T = 0 performed best.