Efficiency of crossover in genetic algorithms

Question

I've implemented a number of genetic algorithms to solve a variety of a problems. However I'm still skeptical of the usefulness of crossover/recombination.

I usually first implement mutation before implementing crossover. And after I implement crossover, I don't typically see a significant speed-up in the rate at which a good candidate solution is generated compared to simply using mutation and introducing a few random individuals in each generation to ensure genetic .

Of course, this may be attributed to poor choices of the crossover function and/or the probabilities, but I'd like to get some concrete explanation/evidence as to why/whether or not crossover improves GAs. Have there been any studies regarding this?

I understand the reasoning behind it: crossover allows the strengths of two individuals to be combined into one individual. But to me that's like saying we can mate a scientist and a jaguar to get a smart and fast hybrid.

EDIT: In mcdowella's answer, he mentioned how finding a case where cross-over can improve upon hill-climbing from multiple start points is non-trivial. Could someone elaborate upon this point?

Answer 1

John Holland's two seminal works "Adaptation in Natural and Artificial Systems" and "Hidden Order" (less formal) discuss the theory of crossover in depth. IMO, Goldberg's "Genetic Algorithms in Search, Optimization, and Machine Learning" has a very approachable chapter on mathematical foundations which includes such conclusions as:

With both crossover and reproduction....those schemata with both above-average performance and short defining lengths are going to be sampled at exponentially increasing rates.

Another good reference might be Ankenbrandt's "An Extension to the Theory of Convergence and a Proof of the Time Complexity of Genetic Algorithms" (in "Foundations of Genetic Algorithms" by Rawlins).

I'm surprised that the power of crossover has not been apparent to you in your work; when I began using genetic algorithms and saw how powerfully "directed" crossover seemed, I felt I gained an insight into evolution that overturned what I had been taught in school. All the questions about "how could mutation lead to this and that?" and "Well, over the course of so many generations..." came to seem fundamentally misguided.

Answer 2

it mainly depends on the search space and the type of crossover you are using. For some problems I found that using crossover at the beginning and then mutation, it will speed up the process for finding a solution, however this is not very good approach since I will end up on finding similar solutions. If we use both crossover and mutation I usually get better optimized solutions. However for some problems crossover can be very destructive.

Also genetic operators alone are not enough to solve large/complex problems. When your operators don't improve your solution (so when they don't increase the value of fitness), you should start considering other solutions such as incremental evolution, etc..

Answer 3

You are correct in being skeptical about the cross-over operation. There is a paper called "On the effectiveness of crossover in simulated evolutionary optimization" (Fogel and Stayton, Biosystems 1994). It is available for free at 1.

By the way, if you haven't already I recommend looking into a technique called "Differential Evolution". It can be very good at solving many optimization problems.

Answer 4

My impression is that hill-climbing from multiple random starts is very effective, but that trying to find a case where cross-over can improve on this is non-trivial. One reference is "Crossover: The Divine Afflatus in Search" by David Icl˘anzan, which states

The traditional GA theory is pillared on the Building Block Hypothesis (BBH) which states that Genetic Algorithms (GAs) work by discovering, emphasizing and recombining low order schemata in high-quality strings, in a strongly parallel manner. Historically, attempts to capture the topological fitness landscape features which exemplify this intuitively straight-forward process, have been mostly unsuccessful. Population-based recombinative methods had been repeatedly outperformed on the special designed abstract test suites, by different variants of mutation-based algorithms.

A related paper is "Overcoming Hierarchical Difficulty by Hill-Climbing the Building Block Structure" by David Iclănzan and Dan Dumitrescu, which states

The Building Block Hypothesis suggests that Genetic Algorithms (GAs) are well-suited for hierarchical problems, where efficient solving requires proper problem decomposition and assembly of solution from sub-solution with strong non-linear interdependencies. The paper proposes a hill-climber operating over the building block (BB) space that can efficiently address hierarchical problems.

Answer 5

The crossover and mutation!! Actually both of them are necessary. Crossover is an explorative operator, but the mutation is an exploitive one. Considering the structure of solutions, problem, and the likelihood of optimization rate, its very important to select a correct value for Pc and Pm (probability of crossover and mutation).

Check this GA-TSP-Solver, it uses many crossover and mutation methods. You can test any crossover alongside mutations with given probabilities.

Answer 6

It strongly depends on the smoothness of your search space. Perverse example if every "geneome" was hashed before being used to generate "phenomes" then you would just be doing random search.

Less extreme case, this is why we often gray-code integers in GAs.

You need to tailor your crossover and mutation functions to the encoding. GAs decay quite easily if you throw unsympathetic calculations at them. If the crossover of A and B doesn't yield something that's both A-like and B-like then it's useless.

Example:

The genome is 3 bits long, bit 0 determines whether it's land-dwelling or sea-dwelling. Bits 1-2 describe digestive functions for land-dwelling creatures and visual capabilities for sea-dwelling creatures.

Consider two land-dwelling creatures.

    | bit 0 | bit 1 | bit 2
----+-------+-------+-------
Mum | 0     | 0     | 1
Dad | 0     | 1     | 0

They might crossover between bits 1 and 2 yielding a child whose digestive function is some compromise between Mum's and Dad's. Great.

This crossover seems sensible provided that bit 0 hasn't changed. If is does then your crossover function has turned some kind of guts into some kind of eyes. Er... Wut? It might as well have been a random mutations.

Begs the question how DNA gets around this problem. Well, it's both modal and hierarchial. There are large sections which can change a lot without much effect, in others a single mutation can have drastic effects (like bit 0 above). Sometimes the value of X affects the behaviour tiggered by Y, and all values of X are legal and can be explored whereas a modification to Y makes the animal segfault.

Theoretical analyses of GAs often use extremely crude encodings and they suffer more from numerical issues than semantic ones.