Estimation of Distribution Algorithms (EDAs)

Estimation of distribution algorithms (EDAs), also called probabilistic model-building genetic algorithms (PMBGAs) and iterated density estimation algorithms (IDEAs), are stochastic optimization methods that view optimization as an incremental process of updating a probabilistic model over admissible solutions. The initial model typically represents the uniform distribution over all admissible solutions whereas the final model would ideally represent the distribution representing only the global optima.