A Lévy Flight-Inspired Random Walk Algorithm for Continuous Fitness Landscape Analysis

Heuristic algorithms are effective methods for solving complex optimization problems. The optimal algorithm selection for a specific optimization problem is a challenging task. Fitness landscape analysis (FLA) is used to understand the optimization problem's characteristics and help select the optimal algorithm. A random walk algorithm is an essential technique for FLA in continuous search space. However, most currently proposed random walk algorithms suffer from unbalanced sampling points. This article proposes a Lévy flight-based random walk (LRW) algorithm to address this problem. The Lévy flight is used to generate the proposed random walk algorithm's variable step size and direction. Some tests show that the proposed LRW algorithm performs better in the uniformity of sampling points. Besides, the authors analyze the fitness landscape of the CEC2017 benchmark functions using the proposed LRW algorithm. The experimental results indicate that the proposed LRW algorithm can better obtain the structural features of the landscape and has better stability than several other RW algorithms.