Hands-On Artificial Intelligence for IoT

Mutation

While the crossover operation ensures variety and can help speed up the search, it does not generate new solutions. This is the work of the mutation operator, which helps in maintaining and introducing diversity in the population. The mutation operator is applied to certain genes (bits) of the child chromosomes with a probability, P_m.

We can have a bit flip mutation; if we consider our earlier example, then in the 16-bit chromosome, the bit flip mutation will cause a single bit to change its state (from 0 to 1 or from 1 to 0).

There is a possibility that we set the gene to a random value for all possible values. This is called random resetting.

The probability P_m plays an important role; if we assign a very low value to P_m it can ...