Distributed genetic algorithm using automated adaptive migration

We present a new distributed genetic algorithm that can be used to extract useful information from distributed, large data over the network. The main idea of the proposed algorithm is to determine how many and which individuals move between subpopulations at each site adaptively. In addition, we present a method to help individuals from other subpopulations not be weeded out but adapt to the new subpopulation. We apply our distributed genetic algorithm to the feature subset selection task which has been one of the active research topics in machine learning. We used six data sets from UCI Machine Learning Repository to compare the performance of our approach with that of the single, centralized genetic algorithm. As a result, the proposed algorithm produced better performance than the single genetic algorithm in terms of the classification accuracy with the feature subsets.