A New Selection Operator Dedicated to Speciation.
Alain Pétrowski · 1997
Most niching methods create and maintain subpopulations of individuals characterized by some similarities. This paper defines the clearing procedure as a niching method that supplies the available resources of a niche only to the best individuals of each subpopulation: the winners. The clearing is naturally adapted to elitist strategies. Elitist clearing preserves good individuals from the destructive effects of genetic drift and reproduction operators, while maintaining a high level of diversity. These properties can dramatically improve the performance of genetic algorithms used for multimodal optimization. The basic clearing procedure selects the winners for reproduction. A standard selection operator then generates a competition between the winners from every subpopulation. This paper shows, through experiments, that this kind of over-selection is harmful. The concept of clearing based selection operator that ensures an equal number of offspring to every winner, regardless of its f...