Cooperative coevolution

Cooperative Coevolution (CC) is an emerging field in evolutionary computation which divides a larger problem into smaller subcomponents and solves those subcomponents independently in order to solve the larger problem^[1]. The subcomponents are also called species. The subcomponents are implemented as subpopulations and the only interaction between subpopulations is in the cooperative evaluation of each individual of the subpopulations. The general CC framework is nature inspired where the individuals of a particular group of species mate amongst themselves, however, mating in between different species is not feasible. The cooperative evaluation of each individual in a subpopulation is done by concatenating the current individual with the best individuals from the rest of the subpopulations as described by M. Potter^[2].

The cooperative coevolution framework has been applied to real world problems such as pedestrian detection systems^[3], large-scale function optimization^[4] and neural network training^[2][5].

Pseudo code

   Procedure Cooperative Coevolution 
     1 Decompose the problem into K subcomponents;
     2 Encode  each subcomponent into a subpopulation  
     3 Initialise and cooperatively evaluate each subpopulation 
   while Stopping conditions are not satisfied do
        for each subpopulation do
            for N generations do
                i Select and build new offspring
                ii Cooperatives evaluate the new offspring
               iii Add new offspring's to the subpopulation
            end for
          end for
       end while

References

1. ^ M. A. Potter and K. A. D. Jong, “A cooperative coevolutionary approach to function optimization,” in PPSN III: Proceedings of the International Conference on Evolutionary Computation. The Third Conference on Parallel Problem Solving from Nature. London, UK:Springer-Verlag, 1994, pp. 249–257.
2. ^ ^{a b} Mitchell A. Potter , Kenneth A. De Jong, Cooperative Coevolution: An Architecture for Evolving Coadapted Subcomponents, Evolutionary Computation, v.8 n.1, 2000, p.1-29.
3. ^ Cao, X., Qiao, H. and Keane, J., A low-cost pedestrian-detection system with a single optical camera. IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems. v9 i1. 58-67.
4. ^ Yang, Z., Tang, K., and Yao, X. 2008. Large scale evolutionary optimization using cooperative coevolution. Inf. Sci. 178, 15 (Aug. 2008), 2985-2999
5. ^ García-Pedrajas, N., Hervás-Martínez, C. and Muñoz Pérez, J., COVNET: a cooperative coevolutionary model for evolving artificial neural networks. IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks. v14 i3. 575-596.