GARA: A novel approach to Improve Genetic Algorithms' Accuracy and Efficiency by Utilizing Relationships among Genes

Genetic algorithms have played an important role in engineering optimization. Traditional GAs treat each gene separately. However, biophysical studies of gene regulatory networks revealed direct associations between different genes. It inspires us to propose an improvement to GA in this paper, Gene Regulatory Genetic Algorithm (GRGA), which, to our best knowledge, is the first time to utilize relationships among genes for improving GA's accuracy and efficiency. We design a directed multipartite graph encapsulating the solution space, called RGGR, where each node corresponds to a gene in the solution and the edge represents the relationship between adjacent nodes. The edge's weight reflects the relationship degree and is updated based on the idea that the edges' weights in a complete chain as candidate solution with acceptable or unacceptable performance should be strengthened or reduced, respectively. The obtained RGGR is then employed to determine appropriate loci of crossover and mutation operators, thereby directing the evolutionary process toward faster and better convergence. We analyze and validate our proposed GRGA approach in a single-objective multimodal optimization problem, and further test it on three types of applications, including feature selection, text summarization, and dimensionality reduction. Results illustrate that our GARA is effective and promising.