Linkage Discovery through Data Mining [Research Frontier]

Genetic algorithms (GAs) are extensively adopted in various aspects of data mining, e.g., association rules, clustering, and classification. Instead of applying GAs for data mining, this study addresses linkage discovery, an essential topic in GAs, by using data mining methods. Inspired by natural evolution, GAs utilize selection, crossover, and mutation operations to evolve candidate solutions into global optima. This evolutionary scheme can effectively resolve many search and optimization problems. As the most salient feature of GAs, crossover enables the recombination of good parts of two selected chromosomes, yet, in doing so, may disrupt the collected promising segments.