Performance Improvement of Genetic Algorithms by Reinforcement Learning

강화학습을 통한 유전자 알고리즘의 성능개선

Genetic Algorithms (GAs) are stochastic algorithms whose search methods model some natural phenomena. The procedure of GAs may be divided into two sub-procedures : Operation and Selection. Chromosomes can produce new offspring by means of operation, and the fitter chromosomes can produce more offspring than the less fit ones by means of selection. However, operation which is executed randomly and has some limits to its execution can not guarantee to produce fitter chromosomes. Thus, we propose a method which gives a directional information to the genetic operator by reinforcement learning. It can be achived by using neural networks to apply reinforcement learning to the genetic operator. We use the amount of fitness change which can be considered as reinforcement signal to calcualte the error terms for the output units. Then the weights are updated using backpropagtion algorithm. The performance improvement of GAs using reinforcement learning can be measured by applying the pr posed method to GA-hard problem.