What variable type is "Population" in a Genetic Algorthim and how to store individuals with long genomes?

I am coding a genetic algorithm where each individual will be made up of several points, ie

Individual1 = [1 2 3 4 5];

Individual2 = [6 7 8 9 10];

on through all the indviduals. I have a custom creation function for the initial population, but I am unsure if I can store each individual in a seperate cell or row, or what to do. The documentation also seemed to say to call the fitness function in my creation function which I don't fully understand, which leads to another question, does my fitness function just output the fitness, or does it need to output the population and fitness in a matrix? Feel free to ask more questions to clarify, this is my first time asking one.

Here is the Documentation on creation functions

function Population = myfun(GenomeLength, FitnessFcn, options)

I am interpreting GenomeLength to be the number of points in each individual and assume that my output Population will look something like follows-

%for k number of individuals

k = 10;

for i = 1:k

Population{i} = IndividualGeneration(GenomeLength); %calls the function for generating the individual and stores that individual in a cell in Population

end

In my mind this ouputs something like this- Population = {1 2 3 4 5}, {6 7 8 9 10}, with each individual in a cell. can the GA work with this format?

Answer 1

[Alan Weiss]

Yes, it is possible to use ga with a custom population. For an example see Custom Data Type Optimization Using the Genetic Algorithm.

Alan Weiss

MATLAB mathematical toolbox documentation

[Jacob Child]

Thank you for that link! Just to make sure I understand what I am reading here is a summary-

ga is made to work (as a default) with the population being a matrix of numbers ie Population = [1 2 3] and each individual has just 1 number.

If I want an individual to contain more than just one number (as is my case), I must provide custom creation, crossover, and mutation functions.

I am trying to avoid that as it is a decent amount of extra work, so can I put each individual in a column ie

3 individuals of 2 points (GenomeLength) would be

Population =

1 2 3

4 5 6

With individual1 = [1; 4]

[Alan Weiss]

You can put each individual into a ROW and use Mixed Integer ga Optimization for an integer-valued population.

Alan Weiss

MATLAB mathematical toolbox documentation