Fitness Proportionate Niching: Harnessing The Power Of Evolutionary Algorithms For Evolving Cooperative Populations And Dynamic Clustering

Evolutionary algorithms work on the notion of best fit will survive criteria. This makes evolving a cooperative and diverse population in a competing environment via evolutionary algorithms a challenging task. Analogies to species interactions in natural ecological systems have been used to develop methods for maintaining diversity in a population. One such area that mimics species interactions in natural systems is the use of niching. Niching methods extend the application of EAs to areas that seeks to embrace multiple solutions to a given problem. The conventional fitness sharing technique has limitations when the multimodal fitness landscape has unequal peaks. Higher peaks are strong population attractors. And this technique suffers from the curse of population size in attempting to discover all optimum points. The use of high population size makes the technique computationally complex, especially when there is a big jump in fitness values of the peaks. This work introduces a novel bio-inspired niching technique, termed Fitness Proportionate Niching (FPN), based on the analogy of finite resource model where individuals share the resource of a niche in proportion to their actual fitness. FPN makes the search algorithm unbiased to the variation in fitness values of the peaks and hence mitigates the drawbacks of conventional fitness sharing. FPN extends the global search ability of Genetic Algorithms (GAs) for evolving hierarchical cooperation in genetics-based machine learning and dynamic clustering. To this end, this work introduces FPN based resource sharing which leads to the formation of a viable default hierarchy in classifiers for the first time. It results in the co-evolution of default and exception rules, which lead to a robust and concise model description. The work also explores the feasibility and success of FPN for dynamic clustering. Unlike most other clustering techniques, FPN based clustering does not require any a priori information on the distribution of the data

Direct And Evolutionary Approaches For Optimal Receiver Function Inversion

Receiver functions are time series obtained by deconvolving vertical component seismograms from radial component seismograms. Receiver functions represent the impulse response of the earth structure beneath a seismic station. Generally, receiver functions consist of a number of seismic phases related to discontinuities in the crust and upper mantle. The relative arrival times of these phases are correlated with the locations of discontinuities as well as the media of seismic wave propagation. The Moho (Mohorovicic discontinuity) is a major interface or discontinuity that separates the crust and the mantle. In this research, automatic techniques to determine the depth of the Moho from the earth’s surface (the crustal thickness H) and the ratio of crustal seismic P-wave velocity (Vp) to S-wave velocity (Vs) (ï«= Vp/Vs) were developed. In this dissertation, an optimization problem of inverting receiver functions has been developed to determine crustal parameters and the three associated weights using evolutionary and direct optimization techniques

Domain-mediated interactions for protein subfamily identification

Within a protein family, proteins with the same domain often exhibit different cellular functions, despite the shared evolutionary history and molecular function of the domain. We hypothesized that domain-mediated interactions (DMIs) may categorize a protein family into subfamilies because the diversified functions of a single domain often depend on interacting partners of domains. Here we systematically identified DMI subfamilies, in which proteins share domains with DMI partners, as well as with various functional and physical interaction networks in individual species. In humans, DMI subfamily members are associated with similar diseases, including cancers, and are frequently co-associated with the same diseases. DMI information relates to the functional and evolutionary subdivisions of human kinases. In yeast, DMI subfamilies contain proteins with similar phenotypic outcomes from specific chemical treatments. Therefore, the systematic investigation here provides insights into the diverse functions of subfamilies derived from a protein family with a link-centric approach and suggests a useful resource for annotating the functions and phenotypic outcomes of proteins.11Ysciescopu

Balancer genetic algorithm-a novel task scheduling optimization approach in cloud computing

Task scheduling is one of the core issues in cloud computing. Tasks are heterogeneous, and they have intensive computational requirements. Tasks need to be scheduled on Virtual Machines (VMs), which are resources in a cloud environment. Due to the immensity of search space for possible mappings of tasks to VMs, meta-heuristics are introduced for task scheduling. In scheduling makespan and load balancing, Quality of Service (QoS) parameters are crucial. This research contributes a novel load balancing scheduler, namely Balancer Genetic Algorithm (BGA), which is presented to improve makespan and load balancing. Insufficient load balancing can cause an overhead of utilization of resources, as some of the resources remain idle. BGA inculcates a load balancing mechanism, where the actual load in terms of million instructions assigned to VMs is considered. A need to opt for multi-objective optimization for improvement in load balancing and makespan is also emphasized. Skewed, normal and uniform distributions of workload and different batch sizes are used in experimentation. BGA has exhibited significant improvement compared with various state-of-the-art approaches for makespan, throughput and load balancing

Gafor : Genetic algorithm based fuzzy optimized re-clustering in wireless sensor networks

Acknowledgments: The authors are grateful to the Deanship of Scientific Research at King Saud University for funding this work through Vice Deanship of Scientific Research Chairs: Chair of Pervasive and Mobile Computing. Funding: This research was funded by King Saud University in 2020.Peer reviewedPublisher PD

ADAPTIVE SEARCH AND THE PRELIMINARY DESIGN OF GAS TURBINE BLADE COOLING SYSTEMS

This research concerns the integration of Adaptive Search (AS) technique such as the Genetic Algorithms (GA) with knowledge based software to develop a research prototype of an Adaptive Search Manager (ASM). The developed approach allows to utilise both quantitative and qualitative information in engineering design decision making. A Fuzzy Expert System manipulates AS software within the design environment concerning the preliminary design of gas turbine blade cooling systems. Steady state cooling hole geometry models have been developed for the project in collaboration with Rolls Royce plc. The research prototype of ASM uses a hybrid of Adaptive Restricted Tournament Selection (ARTS) and Knowledge Based Hill Climbing (KBHC) to identify multiple "good" design solutions as potential design options. ARTS is a GA technique that is particularly suitable for real world problems having multiple sub-optima. KBHC uses information gathered during the ARTS search as well as information from the designer to perform a deterministic hill climbing. Finally, a local stochastic hill climbing fine tunes the "good" designs. Design solution sensitivity, design variable sensitivities and constraint sensitivities are calculated following Taguchi's methodology, which extracts sensitivity information with a very small number of model evaluations. Each potential design option is then qualitatively evaluated separately for manufacturability, choice of materials and some designer's special preferences using the knowledge of domain experts. In order to guarantee that the qualitative evaluation module can evaluate any design solution from the entire design space with a reasonably small number of rules, a novel knowledge representation technique is developed. The knowledge is first separated in three categories: inter-variable knowledge, intra-variable knowledge and heuristics. Inter-variable knowledge and intra-variable knowledge are then integrated using a concept of compromise. Information about the "good" design solutions is presented to the designer through a designer's interface for decision support.Rolls Royce plc., Bristol (UK

Genetic Algorithm Parameter Optimization: Applied to Sensor Coverage

Genetic Algorithms are powerful tools, which when set upon a solution space will search for the optimal answer. These algorithms though have some associated problems, which are inherent to the method such as pre-mature convergence and lack of population diversity. These problems can be controlled with changes to certain parameters such as crossover, selection, and mutation. This paper attempts to tackle these problems in GA by having another GA controlling these parameters. The values for crossover parameter are: one point, two point, and uniform. The values for selection parameters are: best, worst, roulette wheel, inside 50%, outside 50%. The values for the mutation parameter are: random and swap. The system will include a control GA whose population will consist of different parameters settings. While this GA is attempting to find the best parameters it will be advancing into the search space of the problem and refining the population. As the population changes due to the search so will the optimal parameters. For every control GA generation each of the individuals in the population will be tested for fitness by being run through the problem GA with the assigned parameters. During these runs the population used in the next control generation is compiled. Thus, both the issue of finding the best parameters and the solution to the problem are attacked at the same time. The goal is to optimize the sensor coverage in a square field. The test case used was a 30 by 30 unit field with 100 sensor nodes. Each sensor node had a coverage area of 3 by 3 units. The algorithm attempts to optimize the sensor coverage in the field by moving the nodes. The results show that the control GA will provide better results when compared to a system with no parameter changes

Immunology as a metaphor for computational information processing : fact or fiction?

The biological immune system exhibits powerful information processing capabilities, and therefore is of great interest to the computer scientist. A rapidly expanding research area has attempted to model many of the features inherent in the natural immune system in order to solve complex computational problems. This thesis examines the metaphor in detail, in an effort to understand and capitalise on those features of the metaphor which distinguish it from other existing methodologies. Two problem domains are considered — those of scheduling and data-clustering. It is argued that these domains exhibit similar characteristics to the environment in which the biological immune system operates and therefore that they are suitable candidates for application of the metaphor. For each problem domain, two distinct models are developed, incor-porating a variety of immunological principles. The models are tested on a number of artifical benchmark datasets. The success of the models on the problems considered confirms the utility of the metaphor