Fitness Approximation In Evolutionary Computation - a Survey.

Fitness evaluation is a basic operation in evolutionary computation. However, an explicit fitness function is not always available in real-world applications. In many cases, it is necessary to estimate the fitness function by constructing an approximate model. In this paper, a short survey on fitness approximation in evolutionary computation is given. Main issues like approximation models, model management schemes, learning methods as well as data sampling techniques are presented. Finally, interesting open problems are discussed.