Introduction to Evolutionary Algorithms – Towards Data Science

Evolutionary algorithms are a heuristic-based approach to solving problems that cannot be easily solved in polynomial time, such as classically NP-Hard problems, and anything else that would take far too long to exhaustively process. When used on their own, they are typically applied to combinatorial problems; however, genetic algorithms are often used in tandem with other methods, acting as a quick way to find a somewhat optimal starting place for another algorithm to work off of. The premise of an evolutionary algorithm (to be further known as an EA) is quite simple given that you are familiar with the process of natural selection. An EA contains four overall steps: initialization, selection, genetic operators, and termination. These steps each correspond, roughly, to a particular facet of natural selection, and provide easy ways to modularize implementations of this algorithm category.