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Darwinian Evolution in Parallel Universes: A Parallel Genetic Algorithm for Variable Selection

The need to identify a few important variables that affect a certain outcome of interest commonly arises in various industrial engineering applications. The genetic algorithm (GA) appears to be a natural tool for solving such a problem. In this article we first demonstrate that the GA is actually not a particularly effective variable selection tool, and then propose a very simple modification. Our idea is to run a number of GAs in parallel without allowing each GA to fully converge, and to consolidate the information from all the individual GAs in the end. We call the resulting algorithm the parallel genetic algorithm (PGA). Using a number of both simulated and real examples, we show that the PGA is an interesting as well as highly competitive and easy-to-use variable selection tool.