Theoretical analysis and empirical comparison of different population initialization techniques for evolutionary algorithms

Abstract

Evolutionary Algorithms (EAs) are the potential tools for solving optimization problems. The EAs are the population based algorithms and they search for the optimal solution(s) from a initial set of candidates solutions known as population. This population is to be initialized at first before the evolution of the algorithm starts. There exists different ways to initialize this population. Understanding and choosing the right population initialization technique for the given problem is a difficult task for the researchers and problem solvers. To alleviate this issue, this paper is framed with two objectives. The first objective is to present the details of various Population Initialization (PI) techniques of EAs, for the readers to give brief description of all the PI techniques. The second objective is to present the steps and empirical comparison of the results of two different PI techniques implemented for Differential Evolution (DE) algorithm. Theoretical insights and empirical results of the PI techniques are presented in this paper.