A comparison of selection, recombination, and mutation parameter importance over a set of fifteen optimization tasks
Edwin Roger Banks, Paul Agarwal, Marshall McBride, Claudette Owens · 2009
How does one choose an initial set of parameters for an evolutionary computing algorithm? Clearly some choices are dictated by the problem itself, such as the encoding of a problem solution, or how much time is available for running the evolution. Others, however, are frequently found by trial-and-error. These may include population sizes, number of populations, type of selection, recombination and mutation rates, and a variety of other parameters. Sometimes these parameters are allowed to co-evolve along with the solutions rather than by trial-and-error. But in both cases, an initial setting is needed for each parameter.