This book introduces readers to the fundamentals of artificial neural networks, with a special emphasis on evolutionary algorithms. At first, the book offers a literature review of several well-regarded evolutionary algorithms, including particle swarm and ant colony optimization, genetic algorithms and biogeography-based optimization. It then proposes evolutionary version of several types of neural networks such as feed forward neural networks, radial basis function networks, as well as recurrent neural networks and multi-later perceptron. Most of the challenges that have to be addressed when training artificial neural networks using evolutionary algorithms are discussed in detail. The book also demonstrates the application of the proposed algorithms for several purposes such as classification, clustering, approximation, and prediction problems. It provides a tutorial on how to design, adapt, and evaluate artificial neural networks as well, and includes source codes for most of the proposed techniques as supplementary materials.

The second edition of this book provides a comprehensive introduction to a consortium of technologies underlying soft computing, an evolving branch of computational intelligence, which in recent years, has turned synonymous to it. The constituent technologies discussed comprise neural network (NN), fuzzy system (FS), evolutionary algorithm (EA), and a number of hybrid systems, which include classes such as neuro-fuzzy, evolutionary-fuzzy, and neuro-evolutionary systems. The hybridization of the technologies is demonstrated on architectures such as fuzzy backpropagation network (NN-FS hybrid), genetic algorithm-based backpropagation network (NN-EA hybrid), simplified fuzzy ARTMAP (NN-FS hybrid), fuzzy associative memory (NN-FS hybrid), fuzzy logic controlled genetic algorithm (EA-FS hybrid) and evolutionary extreme learning machine (NN-EA hybrid) Every architecture has been discussed in detail through illustrative examples and applications. The algorithms have been presented in pseudo-code with a step-by-step illustration of the same in problems. The applications, demonstrative of the potential of the architectures, have been chosen from diverse disciplines of science and engineering. This book, with a wealth of information that is clearly presented and illustrated by many examples and applications, is designed for use as a text for the courses in soft computing at both the senior undergraduate and first-year postgraduate levels of computer science and engineering. It should also be of interest to researchers and technologists desirous of applying soft computing technologies to their respective fields of work.

Evolutionary Learning Algorithms for Neural Adaptive Control is an advanced textbook, which investigates how neural networks and genetic algorithms can be applied to difficult adaptive control problems which conventional results are either unable to solve , or for which they can not provide satisfactory results. It focuses on the principles involved, rather than on the modelling of the applications themselves, and therefore provides the reader with a good introduction to the fundamental issues involved.

Evolutionary algorithms are becoming increasingly attractive across various disciplines, such as operations research, computer science, industrial engineering, electrical engineering, social science and economics. Introduction to Evolutionary Algorithms presents an insightful, comprehensive, and up-to-date treatment of evolutionary algorithms. It covers such hot topics as: • genetic algorithms, • differential evolution, • swarm intelligence, and • artificial immune systems. The reader is introduced to a range of applications, as Introduction to Evolutionary Algorithms demonstrates how to model real world problems, how to encode and decode individuals, and how to design effective search operators according to the chromosome structures with examples of constraint optimization, multiobjective optimization, combinatorial optimization, and supervised/unsupervised learning. This emphasis on practical applications will benefit all students, whether they choose to continue their academic career or to enter a particular industry. Introduction to Evolutionary Algorithms is intended as a textbook or self-study material for both advanced undergraduates and graduate students. Additional features such as recommended further reading and ideas for research projects combine to form an accessible and interesting pedagogical approach to this widely used discipline.

This book describes the application of evolutionary computation in the automatic generation of a neural network architecture. The architecture has a significant influence on the performance of the neural network. It is the usual practice to use trial and error to find a suitable neural network architecture for a given problem. The process of trial and error is not only time-consuming but may not generate an optimal network. The use of evolutionary computation is a step towards automation in neural network architecture generation.An overview of the field of evolutionary computation is presented, together with the biological background from which the field was inspired. The most commonly used approaches to a mathematical foundation of the field of genetic algorithms are given, as well as an overview of the hybridization between evolutionary computation and neural networks. Experiments on the implementation of automatic neural network generation using genetic programming and one using genetic algorithms are described, and the efficacy of genetic algorithms as a learning algorithm for a feedforward neural network is also investigated.

Genetic algorithms have been used in science and engineering as adaptive algorithms for solving practical problems and as computational models of natural evolutionary systems. This brief, accessible introduction describes some of the most interesting research in the field and also enables readers to implement and experiment with genetic algorithms on their own. It focuses in depth on a small set of important and interesting topics—particularly in machine learning, scientific modeling, and artificial life—and reviews a broad span of research, including the work of Mitchell and her colleagues. The descriptions of applications and modeling projects stretch beyond the strict boundaries of computer science to include dynamical systems theory, game theory, molecular biology, ecology, evolutionary biology, and population genetics, underscoring the exciting "general purpose" nature of genetic algorithms as search methods that can be employed across disciplines. An Introduction to Genetic Algorithms is accessible to students and researchers in any scientific discipline. It includes many thought and computer exercises that build on and reinforce the reader's understanding of the text. The first chapter introduces genetic algorithms and their terminology and describes two provocative applications in detail. The second and third chapters look at the use of genetic algorithms in machine learning (computer programs, data analysis and prediction, neural networks) and in scientific models (interactions among learning, evolution, and culture; sexual selection; ecosystems; evolutionary activity). Several approaches to the theory of genetic algorithms are discussed in depth in the fourth chapter. The fifth chapter takes up implementation, and the last chapter poses some currently unanswered questions and surveys prospects for the future of evolutionary computation.

This book delivers the state of the art in deep learning (DL) methods hybridized with evolutionary computation (EC). Over the last decade, DL has dramatically reformed many domains: computer vision, speech recognition, healthcare, and automatic game playing, to mention only a few. All DL models, using different architectures and algorithms, utilize multiple processing layers for extracting a hierarchy of abstractions of data. Their remarkable successes notwithstanding, these powerful models are facing many challenges, and this book presents the collaborative efforts by researchers in EC to solve some of the problems in DL. EC comprises optimization techniques that are useful when problems are complex or poorly understood, or insufficient information about the problem domain is available. This family of algorithms has proven effective in solving problems with challenging characteristics such as non-convexity, non-linearity, noise, and irregularity, which dampen the performance of most classic optimization schemes. Furthermore, EC has been extensively and successfully applied in artificial neural network (ANN) research —from parameter estimation to structure optimization. Consequently, EC researchers are enthusiastic about applying their arsenal for the design and optimization of deep neural networks (DNN). This book brings together the recent progress in DL research where the focus is particularly on three sub-domains that integrate EC with DL: (1) EC for hyper-parameter optimization in DNN; (2) EC for DNN architecture design; and (3) Deep neuroevolution. The book also presents interesting applications of DL with EC in real-world problems, e.g., malware classification and object detection. Additionally, it covers recent applications of EC in DL, e.g. generative adversarial networks (GAN) training and adversarial attacks. The book aims to prompt and facilitate the research in DL with EC both in theory and in practice.