134 lines
6.6 KiB
Markdown
134 lines
6.6 KiB
Markdown
---
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title: "Evolutionary Strategy Meal Planning"
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date: 2019-09-24T15:23:59-04:00
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draft: false
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---
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While sitting in my house just day dreaming, I was looking for ideas for my next project. Thoughts flew across my mind relating things that
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I was currently doing, challenges I was currently facing, and technology. Thinking back to my days at GMU, I remembered how much I really liked my
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Artificial Intelligence class, specifically evolutionary algorithms and genetic programming. I also thought of how hard it was to track macronutrients
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(something I'm currently doing) whenever I went out to eat at my favorite restaurants. Thinking about different ways to automatically meal plan, I had an idea.
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What if, given a database of nutrition information from a specific restaurant, I could "evolve" the best meal for myself based on evolutionary strategy
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algorithms I had learned about in class? With this question in mind, I set out to see whether or not my question was feasible.
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## Candidate Solutions, and Evaluating Fitness
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What would my candidates even look like that I would feed into the algorithm. Can I model meals in a way that I can "breed" or "mutate" them in order to
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achieve better fitness scores over time? What would my fitness evaluator function look like?
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I started on the question of candidates. I downloaded the nutritional spreadsheet from my favorite local sports bar, Beef O'Brady's, and got to work. My
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favorite programming language, Julia, has a complex type system. It allows for very complex data to be modeled and represented in a native type.
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In the end though, my choice of data structure was influenced by the structure of my data. The nutritional spreadsheet that I downloaded from the sports bar had
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each menu item represented in a row. To read the data, I used the Julia library ExcelReaders.jl, which was able to stuff my data into a Julia DataFrame. I
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decided that candidate solutions could just be n-row DataFrame objects, a randomly selected subset of size n taken from the entire dataset.
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```julia
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"""
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Helper function to generate a random candidate from the dataset.
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n is the size of the candidate.
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"""
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function randomCandidate(n::Integer)
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# Select n random rows from the dataset.
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rows = [randRow() for i = 1:n]
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df[rows, :]
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end
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"""
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generateInitialPopulation(lambda::Integer, candidateSize::Integer)
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From our dataset, generate an array of initial candidates to begin the search.
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"""
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function generateInitialPopulation(lambda::Integer, candidateSize::Integer)
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[randomCandidate(candidateSize) for i = 1:lambda]
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end
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```
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With the design of the candidate solutions in hand, I thought that the easiest method for evaluating the fitness of these solutions would be a simple subtraction.
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I built my fitness evaluation function to take the absolute value of the difference of my target calories with the total calories of a candidate meal.
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```julia
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"""
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fitness(candidate::DataFrames.DataFrame)
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Calculate the fitness of the candidate, which is the
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absolute value of the difference of TARGETCALORIES and the sum
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of all calories in the meal.
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"""
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function fitness(candidate::DataFrames.DataFrame)
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abs(TARGETCALORIES - sum(+, candidate[:Calories]))
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end
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```
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With the candidate solutions designed, and the fitness evaluation function now complete, I had to decide on an actual algorithm to grow generations
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of meals with better and better fitness scores. To find the right algorithm I turned to an old textbook of mine, The Essentials of Metaheuristics. Within
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this book, Algorithm 18, the (mu, lambda) strategy, seemed perfect [1].
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## The (mu/lambda) Evolution Strategy.
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Boiled down, this algorithm consists of a few, discrete steps. The first step is to generate an initial population. I do this using the functions I pasted
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above to build a population of size lambda. The next step, is to begin evolving new solutions to our existing problem. The evolution process can be broken
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down into a few steps as well. The first step is to evaluate the fitness of all members of the population, saving the most fit candidate we saw in the
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evaluation process. The next step is to save the `mu` candidates who had the highest fitness scores (this is called truncation selection). The final step is
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to iterate over each of our `mu` parents we selected, and to `lambda/mu` times generate new children by mutating copies of the parent. We only exit the
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evolution process if the best candidate from the generation is the ideal solution, or we have ran out of time.
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## My Mutation Algorithm
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The mutation algorithm that I designed is very simple, it merely walks each of the items within a meal (rows in a small dataframe), and flips a coin on each one.
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If the result is heads, it will replace that food item with a randomly selected row from the dataset. If the result is tails, it will move on to the next food
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item and flip another coin. It repeats this process until it has iterated through all rows in a candidate solution.
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```julia
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"""
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Our mutator function
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steps through the parent, and randomly selects the
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allelles to delete. Will replace the alleles with new
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alleles (meals).
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"""
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function mutate(parent)
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# Copy the parent so we can do some work.
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child = deepcopy(parent)
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toDelete = []
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for i in 1:size(parent, 1)
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if rand(Float64) > 0.5 # NOTE: make this tunable
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push!(toDelete, i)
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end
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# If we get tails, delete the row and push a new one to it.
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end
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# Delete all rows we don't want at once.
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DataFrames.deleterows!(child, toDelete)
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# Add new random rows from the ones we deleted
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for i in 1:length(toDelete)
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push!(child, df[randRow(), :])
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end
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child
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end
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```
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## Results
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Using Algorithm 18 [1], and all the above functions, I implemented the (mu, lambda) evolutionary meal planning strategy. My candidate solutions were subset DataFrames
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drawn from the DataFrame of the entire dataset. My mutator function was based on a simple "coin flip" probability, replacing random meal items with other random
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meal items in hopes of mutating into a higher fitness meal. The results from a few runs are shown below.
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I definitely think that even from my small experiment, the results do show that evolutionary strategies are adequate search algorithms in the search space of meal
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planning. If you can model meals in such a way that they are made up of food items which can be modified or replaced (like alleles), then applying the algorithm
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is straightforward after that.
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## References
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[1]: [The Essentials of Metaheuristics, Sean Luke, Pg. 33](https://cs.gmu.edu/~sean/book/metaheuristics/Essentials.pdf)
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