Runtime Analysis of Quality Diversity Algorithms

Abstract: Quality diversity~(QD) is a branch of evolutionary computation that gained increasing interest in recent years. The Map-Elites QD approach defines a feature space, i.e., a partition of the search space, and stores the best solution for each cell of this space. We study a simple QD algorithm in the context of pseudo-Boolean optimisation on the ``number of ones'' feature space, where the $i$th cell stores the best solution amongst those with a number of ones in $[(i-1)k, ik-1]$. Here $k$ is a granularity parameter $1 \leq k \leq n+1$. We give a tight bound on the expected time until all cells are covered for arbitrary fitness functions and for all $k$ and analyse the expected optimisation time of QD on \textsc{OneMax} and other problems whose structure aligns favourably with the feature space. On combinatorial problems we show that QD finds a ${(1-1/e)}$-approximation when maximising any monotone sub-modular function with a single uniform cardinality constraint efficiently. Defining the feature space as the number of connected components of a connected graph, we show that QD finds a minimum spanning tree in expected polynomial time.