Illinois Genetic Algorithms Laboratory

In one of today’s GECCO sessions, I run into a talk by Doug Newell founder of Genalytics. First I wasn’t sure what he would cover, but in the end it was a very interesting talk. He covered several topics. He started talking about direct marketing. The bottom line, direct marketing is still using mail as a main stream–yes, regular mail. Corporations are working to learn how to improve their targeting capabilities. Sophisticated analytics can improve the targeting up to a 25%. However, statisticians, usually using SAS, and taking around 3 weeks synthesize such models for improvement. Some of the methods use regression, logistics egression, neural networks, and decision trees. Doug show some of their work were GAs can beat the traditional approaches. Another friendly marketing area for GA applications—in Doug’s words–is fraud detention.

Next talk was about Eric Bonabeau presented some of the work of Icosystems on interactive evolution. They path–different from our current work on iGAs–empowers users with all sorts of freedom over the evolutionary process. One application: tile design. They are interested in the navigation across the search space, which is why they are more interested on the evolutionary path, instead of getting a final solution.

Mental note to self: Lack of fit of the adjustment of the model (LOF) by Flor Castillo (Dow Chemichal). Any of these statistics could be used in genetic-based machine learning?