Genetic Algorithms

Genetic Algorithms(GAs) are adaptive heuristic search algorithms that belong to the
larger part of evolutionary algorithms. Genetic algorithms are based on the ideas of
natural selection and genetics. These are intelligent exploitation of random search
provided with historical data to direct the search into the region of better performance
in solution space. They are commonly used to generate high-quality solutions for
optimization problems and search problems.

Genetic algorithms simulate the process of natural selection which means those
species who can adapt to changes in their environment are able to survive and reproduce
and go to next generation. In simple words, they simulate “survival of the fittest” among
individual of consecutive generation for solving a problem. Each generation consist
of a population of individuals and each individual represents a point in search space
and possible solution. Each individual is represented as a string of
character/integer/float/bits. This string is analogous to the Chromosome.

Foundation of Genetic Algorithms

Genetic algorithms are based on an analogy with genetic structure and behaviour of
chromosomes of the population. Following is the foundation of GAs based on this
analogy –
1. Individual in population compete for resources and mate
2. Those individuals who are successful (fittest) then mate to create more
offspring than others
3. Genes from “fittest” parent propagate throughout the generation, that is
sometimes parents create offspring which is better than either parent.
4. Thus each successive generation is more suited for their environment.

Search space

The population of individuals are maintained within search space. Each

individual represents a solution in search space for given problem. Each
individual is coded as a finite length vector (analogous to chromosome) of
components. These variable components are analogous to Genes. Thus a
chromosome (individual) is composed of several genes (variable
components).
 Fitness Score

A Fitness Score is given to each individual which shows the ability of an

individual to “compete”. The individual having optimal fitness score (or near
optimal) are sought.

The GAs maintains the population of n individuals (chromosome/solutions)

along with their fitness scores.The individuals having better fitness scores are
given more chance to reproduce than others. The individuals with better
fitness scores are selected who mate and produce better offspring by
combining chromosomes of parents. The population size is static so the room
has to be created for new arrivals. So, some individuals die and get replaced
by new arrivals eventually creating new generation when all the mating
opportunity of the old population is exhausted. It is hoped that over successive
generations better solutions will arrive while least fit die.

Each new generation has on average more “better genes” than the individual
(solution) of previous generations. Thus each new generations have
better “partial solutions” than previous generations. Once the offspring
produced having no significant difference from offspring produced by previous
populations, the population is converged. The algorithm is said to be
converged to a set of solutions for the problem.

Operators of Genetic Algorithms

Once the initial generation is created, the algorithm evolves the generation
using following operators –

1) Selection Operator: The idea is to give preference to the individuals with

good fitness scores and allow them to pass their genes to successive
generations.

2) Crossover Operator: This represents mating between individuals. Two

individuals are selected using selection operator and crossover sites are
chosen randomly. Then the genes at these crossover sites are exchanged
thus creating a completely new individual (offspring). For example –
3) Mutation Operator: The key idea is to insert random genes in offspring to
maintain the diversity in the population to avoid premature convergence. For
example –

The whole algorithm can be summarized as –

1) Randomly initialize populations p
2) Determine fitness of population
3) Until convergence repeat:
a) Select parents from population
b) Crossover and generate new population
c) Perform mutation on new population
d) Calculate fitness for new population

Example problem and solution using Genetic Algorithms

Given a target string, the goal is to produce target string starting from a random
string of the same length. In the following implementation, following analogies
are made –
 Characters A-Z, a-z, 0-9, and other special symbols are considered as
genes
 A string generated by these characters is considered as
chromosome/solution/Individual
Fitness score is the number of characters which differ from characters in
target string at a particular index. So individual having lower fitness value is
given more preference.

Why use Genetic Algorithms

 They are Robust

 Provide optimisation over large space state.
 Unlike traditional AI, they do not break on slight change in input or
presence of noise
 Application of Genetic Algorithms

Genetic algorithms have many applications, some of them are –

 Recurrent Neural Network
 Mutation testing
 Code breaking
 Filtering and signal processing
 Learning fuzzy rule base etc