Crossover¶
A crossover operator defines how two individuals should be combined to create a new individual (or individuals). Importantly, the crossover operator allows for the preservation of preferable characteristics found by the genetic algorithm.
In EDO, the crossover operator returns exactly one individual from a pair of parents. As is discussed elsewhere_, an individual is created by sampling its dimensions and then its values. Creating an offspring is done in the same way except it inherits these characteristics from its parents:
- Inherit a number of rows and a number of columns from either parent, independently and uniformly. This is the skeleton of the dataset.
- Pool together the columns (and respective column distributions) from both parents.
- Sample from this pool uniformly (and without replacement) to fill in the columns of the offspring’s dataset. Now the dataset has values and instructions on how to manipulate it.
- Remove surplus rows as required, and fill in any missing values using the corresponding column information. This is now a complete individual.
Before this offspring is added to population, it must undergo mutation.
Example¶
Consider the following example where two individuals are created:
>>> import numpy as np
>>> from edo import Family
>>> from edo.distributions import Poisson
>>> from edo.individual import create_individual
>>> from edo.operators import crossover
>>>
>>> row_limits, col_limits = [1, 3], [2, 3]
>>> families = [Family(Poisson)]
>>> states = [np.random.RandomState(i) for i in range(2)]
>>>
>>> parents = [
... create_individual(
... row_limits, col_limits, families, weights=None, random_state=state
... ) for state in states
... ]
These individuals’ dataframes look like this:
>>> parents[0].dataframe
0 1 2
0 12 0 12
>>> parents[1].dataframe
0 1 2
0 0 5 7
1 4 4 9
And their metadata like this:
>>> parents[0].metadata
[Poisson(lam=7.15), Poisson(lam=0.87), Poisson(lam=8.33)]
>>> parents[1].metadata
[Poisson(lam=7.2), Poisson(lam=3.97), Poisson(lam=8.01)]
Now, we create a PRNG for the offspring and apply the crossover:
>>> state = np.random.RandomState(2)
>>> offspring = crossover(*parents, col_limits, families, state)
>>>
>>> offspring.dataframe
0 1 2
0 0 12 7
>>> offspring.metadata
[Poisson(lam=7.2), Poisson(lam=8.33), Poisson(lam=8.01)]