Accelerating real-valued genetic algorithms using mutation-with-momentum

Directed mutation has been proposed for improving the convergence speed of GAs on problems involving real-valued alleles. This paper proposes a directed mutation approach based on the momentum term used in gradient descent training of neural networks. Mutation-with-momentum is compared against gaussian mutation and is shown to regularly result in improvements in performance during early generations. A hybrid of momentum and gaussian mutation is shown to outperform either individual approach to mutation.