Genetic Linkage Learning Techniques

Abstract

The importance of learning genetic linkage has been discussed in the previous chapter and recognized in the field of genetic and evolutionary algorithms [28, 32, 53]. A design-decomposition methodology for successful design of genetic and evolutionary algorithms was proposed in the literature [29, 30, 32, 34, 40] and introduced previously. One of the key elements of the design-decomposition theory is genetic linkage learning. Research in the past decade has shown that genetic algorithms that are capable of learning genetic linkage and exploiting good building-block linkage can solve boundedly hard problems quickly, accurately, and reliably. Such competent genetic and evolutionary algorithms take the problems that were intractable for the first-generation genetic algorithms and render them practical in polynomial time (oftentimes, in subquadratic time) [32, 72–74]