During the last several decades, many kinds of population based Evolutionary Algorithms have been developed and considerable work has been devoted to computational methods which are inspired by biological evolution and natural selection, such as Evolutionary Programming and Clonal Selection Algorithm. The objective of these algorithms is not only to find suitable adjustments to the current population and hence the solution, but also to perform the process efficiently. However, a parameter setting that was optimal at the beginning of the algorithm may become unsuitable during the evolutionary process. Thus, it is preferable to automatically modify the control parameters during the runtime process. The approach required could have a bias on the distribution towards appropriate directions of the search space, thereby maintaining sufficient diversity among individuals in order to enable further ability of evolution. This thesis has offered an initial approach to developing this idea. The work starts from a clear understanding of the literature that is of direct relevance to the aforementioned motivations. The development of this approach has been built upon the basis of the fundamental and generic concepts of evolutionary algorithms. The work has exploited and benefited from a range of representative evolutionary computational mechanisms. In particular, essential issues in evolutionary algorithms such as parameter control, including the general aspects of parameter tuning and typical means for implementing parameter control have been investigated. Both the hyperheuristic algorithm and the memetic algorithm have set up a comparative work for the present development. This work has developed several novel techniques that contribute towards the advancement of evolutionary computation and optimization. One such novel approach is to construct a mixed strategy based on the concept of local fitness landscape. It exploits the concepts of fitness landscape and local fitness landscape. Both theoretical description and experimental investigation of this local fitness landscape based mixed strategy have been provided, and systematic comparisons with alternative approaches carried out. Another contribution of this thesis is the innovative application of mixed strategy. This is facilitated by encompassing two mutation operators into the mixed strategy, which are borrowed from classical differential evolution techniques. Such an improved method has been shown to be simple and easy for implementation. The work has been utilised to deal with the problem of protein folding in bioinformatics. It is demonstrated that the proposed algorithm possesses an appropriate balance between exploration and exploitation. The use of this improved algorithm is less likely to fall into local optimal, entailing a faster and better convergence in resolving challenging realistic application problems.
Date of Award | 05 May 2016 |
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Original language | English |
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Awarding Institution | |
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Supervisor | Jun He (Supervisor) & Qiang Shen (Supervisor) |
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Evolutionary Algorithms with Mixed Strategy
Shen, L. (Author). 05 May 2016
Student thesis: Doctoral Thesis › Doctor of Philosophy