A novel method of individual level adaptive mutation rate control called the rank-scaled mutation rate for genetic algorithms is introduced. The rank-scaled mutation rate controlled genetic algorithm varies the mutation parameters based on the rank of each individual within the population. Thereby the distribution of the fitness of the papulation is taken into consideration in forming the new m...

Recent outbreaks of novel infectious diseases (e.g. SARS, influenza H1N1) have highlighted the threat of cross-species pathogen transmission. When first introduced to a population, a pathogen is often poorly adapted to its new host and must evolve in order to escape extinction. Theoretical arguments and empirical studies have suggested various factors to explain why some pathogens emerge and ot...

Unit commitment (UC) problem tries to schedule output power of generation units to meet the system demand for the next several hours at minimum cost. UC adds a time dimension to the economic dispatch problem with the additional choice of turning generators to be on or off.  In this paper, in order to improve both the exploitation and exploration abilities of the firefly algorithm (FA), a new mo...

objective(s): it has been reported that the mutation of the pre-core (pc) and basal-core promoter (bcp) may play an important role in the development of hbv-related hepatocellular carcinoma (hcc). in this study the pc and bcp mutations were investigated in chronic hbv patients. materials and methods:in this study, 120 chronic hbv patients from golestan, northeast of iran who were not vaccinated...

The opportunity for a mutation to invade a population can dramatically vary depending on the context in which this mutation occurs. Such context dependence is difficult to document as it requires the ability to measure how a mutation affects phenotypes and fitness and to manipulate the context in which the mutation occurs. We identified a mutation in a gene encoding a global regulator in one of...

In order to study the efficacy of genetic algorithms (GAs), a number of fitness landscapes have been designed and used as test functions. Among these functions a family of deceptive functions have been developed as difficult test functions for comparing different implementations of GAs. In this paper an adaptive group mutation (AGM), which can be combined with traditional bit mutation in GAs, i...