Team:Groningen/modeling genetic algorithms

From 2011.igem.org

Revision as of 09:33, 31 August 2011 by Jaap (Talk | contribs)


Genetic algorithms

Genetic algorithms, (also reffered to as dynamic programming or

Convergence

How genetic algorithms work

A genetic alogoritm mimics the process of population genetics in order to optimise some fitness criteron. In our case this criterion is based on how good the simulated data matches the experimental results. By


It repeats teh following step a number of times (either a fixed number of times, or contrained by some metrix such as the fitness or the change thereof.)


Mutation

In the mutation step we add new individuals to the population. This can be done in many different ways. Classically crossingover (using values of two individuals and mixing them up into a new individual) and point mutations (adjusting a single value by a small random amount) are very popular.
In cumulus we use a method calles gausian estimation. This method assumes the optimalety surface is roughly in the shape of a n-dimensiona gausian. In the selection step we try to estimate the shape of this guasion by taking the covariance matrix of all the individuals in the population(weigthed by fitness) Then we restore our population by randomly drawing new individuals from this gausian distribution.

Evaluation

In the evaluation step yet unevaluated individuals are evaluated. In most al

Selection

In the selection step we discard some individuals of our population that we deem not good enough