Adaptive mutation with fitness and allele distribution correlation for genetic algorithms

In this paper, a new gene based adaptive mutation scheme is proposed for genetic algorithms (GAs), where the information on gene based fitness statistics and on gene based allele distribution statistics are correlated to explicitly adapt the mutation probability for each gene locus over time. A convergence control mechanism is combined with the proposed mutation scheme to maintain sufficient diversity in the population. Experiments are carried out to compare the proposed mutation scheme to traditional mutation and two advanced adaptive mutation schemes on a set of optimization problems. The experimental results show that the proposed mutation scheme efficiently improves GA's performance.