A method and apparatus are useful for decomposing a complex distribution of data by modeling the complex distribution as a sum of discrete simple distributions, and processing the simple distributions independently. The independent processing enables the complex distribution to be reconstructed without the simple distributions that are concluded to be spurious. The simple distributions preferably include one or more statistical distributions that are subject to being characterized by a reduced data set for efficient communication and reconstruction of the complex distribution. The modeling and processing steps preferably employ one or more evolutionary algorithms.