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Genetic Algorithms - Parent Selection

The document discusses various parent selection methods in Genetic Algorithms (GAs), emphasizing the importance of maintaining diversity to avoid premature convergence. It details Fitness Proportionate Selection, including Roulette Wheel Selection and Stochastic Universal Sampling, as well as Tournament Selection and Rank Selection, which can handle negative fitness values. Random Selection is mentioned as a less favorable method due to the lack of selection pressure on fitter individuals.

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27 views5 pages

Genetic Algorithms - Parent Selection

The document discusses various parent selection methods in Genetic Algorithms (GAs), emphasizing the importance of maintaining diversity to avoid premature convergence. It details Fitness Proportionate Selection, including Roulette Wheel Selection and Stochastic Universal Sampling, as well as Tournament Selection and Rank Selection, which can handle negative fitness values. Random Selection is mentioned as a less favorable method due to the lack of selection pressure on fitter individuals.

Uploaded by

arunntw2004
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Genetic Algorithms - Parent Selection


Parent Selection is the process of selecting parents which mate and recombine to create
off-springs for the next generation. Parent selection is very crucial to the convergence
rate of the GA as good parents drive individuals to a better and fitter solutions.

However, care should be taken to prevent one extremely fit solution from taking over the
entire population in a few generations, as this leads to the solutions being close to one
another in the solution space thereby leading to a loss of diversity. Maintaining good
diversity in the population is extremely crucial for the success of a GA. This taking up of
the entire population by one extremely fit solution is known as premature
convergence and is an undesirable condition in a GA.

Fitness Proportionate Selection


Fitness Proportionate Selection is one of the most popular ways of parent selection. In
this every individual can become a parent with a probability which is proportional to its
fitness. Therefore, fitter individuals have a higher chance of mating and propagating
their features to the next generation. Therefore, such a selection strategy applies a
selection pressure to the more fit individuals in the population, evolving better
individuals over time.

Consider a circular wheel. The wheel is divided into n pies, where n is the number of
individuals in the population. Each individual gets a portion of the circle which is
proportional to its fitness value.

Two implementations of fitness proportionate selection are possible −

Roulette Wheel Selection

In a roulette wheel selection, the circular wheel is divided as described before. A fixed
point is chosen on the wheel circumference as shown and the wheel is rotated. The
region of the wheel which comes in front of the fixed point is chosen as the parent. For
the second parent, the same process is repeated.
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It is clear that a fitter individual has a greater pie on the wheel and therefore a greater
chance of landing in front of the fixed point when the wheel is rotated. Therefore, the
probability of choosing an individual depends directly on its fitness.

Implementation wise, we use the following steps −

Calculate S = the sum of a finesses.

Generate a random number between 0 and S.

Starting from the top of the population, keep adding the finesses to the partial
sum P, till P<S.
The individual for which P exceeds S is the chosen individual.

Stochastic Universal Sampling (SUS)

Stochastic Universal Sampling is quite similar to Roulette wheel selection, however


instead of having just one fixed point, we have multiple fixed points as shown in the
following image. Therefore, all the parents are chosen in just one spin of the wheel. Also,
such a setup encourages the highly fit individuals to be chosen at least once.
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It is to be noted that fitness proportionate selection methods don’t work for cases where
the fitness can take a negative value.

Tournament Selection
In K-Way tournament selection, we select K individuals from the population at random
and select the best out of these to become a parent. The same process is repeated for
selecting the next parent. Tournament Selection is also extremely popular in literature as
it can even work with negative fitness values.

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Rank Selection
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Rank Selection also works with negative fitness values and is mostly used when the
individuals in the population have very close fitness values (this happens usually at the
end of the run). This leads to each individual having an almost equal share of the pie
(like in case of fitness proportionate selection) as shown in the following image and
hence each individual no matter how fit relative to each other has an approximately
same probability of getting selected as a parent. This in turn leads to a loss in the
selection pressure towards fitter individuals, making the GA to make poor parent
selections in such situations.

In this, we remove the concept of a fitness value while selecting a parent. However,
every individual in the population is ranked according to their fitness. The selection of
the parents depends on the rank of each individual and not the fitness. The higher
ranked individuals are preferred more than the lower ranked ones.

Chromosome Fitness Value Rank

A 8.1 1

B 8.0 4

C 8.05 2

D 7.95 6

E 8.02 3

F 7.99 5

Random Selection
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In this strategy we randomly select parents from the existing population. There is no
selection pressure towards fitter individuals and therefore this strategy is usually
avoided.

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