enhancing search space diversity in multi-objective evolutionary drug molecule design using niching
There exist several applications of multi-objective evolutionary algorithms for drug design, however, a common drawback in recent approaches is that the diversity of resulting molecule populations is relatively low. This paper seeks to overcome this problem by introducing niching as a technique to enhance search space diversity. A single population approach with dynamic niche identification is studied in the application domain. In order to apply niching in molecular spaces a metric for measuring the dissimilarity of molecules will be introduced. The approach will be validated in case studies and compared with results of an NSGA-II algorithm without niching in the search space.
molecules evolutionary algorithms drug design