Evolutionary computation meets machine learning: A survey

Evolutionary computation (EC) is a kind of optimization methodology inspired by the mechanisms of biological evolution and behaviors of living organisms. SI algorithms share many common characteristics with EAs and are also regarded to be in the EC algorithm family. The new population is then evaluated again and the iteration continues until a termination criterion is satisfied. ML is one of the most promising and salient research areas in artificial intelligence, which has experienced a rapid development and has become a powerful tool in a wide range of applications. In many applications, EC algorithms incorporating ML techniques have been proven to be advantageous in both convergence speed and solution quality. The survey is organized from the EC perspective, including population initialization, fitness evaluation and selection, population reproduction and variation, algorithm adaptation, and local search.