Alternative Random Initialization in Genetic Algorithms.
Leila Kallel, Marc Schoenauer · 1997
Though unanimously recognized as a crucial step in Evolutionary Algorithms, initialization procedures have not been paid much attention so far. In bitstring Genetic Algorithms, for instance, the standard 0/1 equiprobable choice for every bit is rarely discussed, as the resulting distribution probability over the whole bitstring space is uniform. However, uniformity is relative to a measure on the search space. First, considering the measure given by the density of 1's, the Uniform Covering initialization procedure is naturally designed. Second, taking into account the probability of appearance of sequences of identical bits leads to design another alternative initialization procedure, the Homogeneous Block procedure. These procedures are compared with the standard initialization procedure on several problems. A priori comparison is achieved using FitnessDistance Correlation. Actual experiments demonstrate the accuracy of these FDCbased comparisons, and emphasize the usefulness of the two proposed procedure. 1