Evaluation of search performance of bacterial evolutionary algorithm

The search performance of evolutionary algorithms (EAs) has been widely studied. Interactions between genes in a chromosome, called "epistasis", make the theoretical investigation difficult. The goal of this study is a mathematical analysis of the effects of bacterial mutation on a bacterial evolutionary algorithm (BEA). The NK-landscape problem is employed for the investigation of this analysis in this paper. The search ability of bacterial mutation is formulated and compared with those of conventional mutation operations. It is shown that the bacterial mutation surpasses conventional ones in search performance.