Hands-On Genetic Algorithms with Python

Optimizing the MLP architecture using genetic algorithms

Now that we have a way to represent the architecture configuration of the MLP that's used to classify the Iris flower dataset and a way to determine the accuracy of the MLP for each configuration, we can move on and create a genetic algorithm-based optimizer to search for the configuration – the number of hidden layers (up to 4, in our case) and the number of nodes in each layer – that will yield the best accuracy. This solution is implemented by the Python program 01-optimize-mlp-layers.py, which is located at https://github.com/PacktPublishing/Hands-On-Genetic-Algorithms-with-Python/blob/master/Chapter09/01-optimize-mlp-layers.py.

The following steps describe the main parts of this ...