Abhinav Choudhary walks us through building a genetic algorithm library in Python:
Here are quick steps for how the genetic algorithm works:
1. Initial Population– Initialize the population randomly based on the data.
2. Fitness function– Find the fitness value of the each of the chromosomes(a chromosome is a set of parameters which define a proposed solution to the problem that the genetic algorithm is trying to solve)
3. Selection– Select the best fitted chromosomes as parents to pass the genes for the next generation and create a new population
4. Cross-over– Create new set of chromosome by combining the parents and add them to new population set
5. Mutation– Perfrom mutation which alters one or more gene values in a chromosome in the new population set generated. Mutation helps in getting more diverse oppourtinity.Obtained population will be used in the next generation
I’m a sucker for genetic algorithms (and even more so its cousin, genetic programming). And there are still good use cases for genetic algorithms, especially in creating scoring functions for neural networks.