Analysis of the Clearing Diversity-Preserving Mechanism

Clearing is a niching method inspired by the principle of assigning the available resources among a subpopulation to a single individual. The clearing procedure supplies these resources only to the best individual of each subpopulation: the winner. So far, its analysis has been focused on experimental approaches that have shown that clearing is a powerful diversity mechanism. We use empirical analysis to highlight some of the characteristics that makes it a useful mechanism and runtime analysis to explain how and why it is a powerful method. We prove that a (mu+1) EA with large enough population size and a phenotypic distance function always succeeds in optimising all functions of unitation for small niches in polynomial time, while a genotypic distance function requires exponential time. Finally, we prove that a (mu+1) EA with phenotypic and genotypic distances is able to find both optima in TWOMAX for large niches in polynomial expected time.