An immune algorithm with hyper-macromutations for the Dill's 2D hydrophobic-hydrophilic model

This paper presents an immune algorithm (IA) based on clonal selection principle using a mutation operator, the hypermacromutation, and an aging process to tackle the protein structure prediction problem (PSP) in the 2D hydrophobic-hydrophilic model. The IA presented has only three parameters. To correctly set these parameters we compute the parameter surfaces, the 3D plots of IA success rate in function of the cloning parameter and the maximum age allowed to each B cell. The parameter surfaces show that hypermacromutation and aging operators are key features for generating diversity and searching more properly the funnel landscape of the PSP problem. Experiments show that the immune algorithm we propose is very competitive with the state-of-art algorithms for the PSP.