If I had the weights of a certain number of "parents" that I wanted to crossbreed, and I used whatever method to pick out the "best parents" (I used a roulette wheel option, if that's any relevant), would I be doing this correctly?
For example, suppose I have picked the following two parents.
\begin{align} P_1 &= [0.5, -0.02, 0.4, 0.1, -0.9] \\ P_2 &= [0.42, 0.55, 0.18, -0.3, 0.12] \end{align}
When I'm iterating through each index (or gene) of the parents, I am selecting a weight from one parent only. I called this rate the "cross-rate", which in my case is $0.2$ (i.e. with $20$% chance, I will switch to choosing the other parents' weight).
So, using our example above, this is what would happen:
\begin{align} P_1 &=[\mathbf{0.5}, \mathbf{-0.02}, 0.4, 0.1, \mathbf{-0.9}] \\ P_2 &= [0.42, 0.55, \mathbf{0.18}, \mathbf{-0.3}, 0.12] \end{align}
So the child would be
$$C = [0.5, -0.02, 0.18, -0.3, -0.9]$$
I would choose $0.5$ from $P_1$, but for every time I choose a weight from $P_1$, there's a 20% chance that I actually choose the corresponding gene from $P_2$. But, for the first weight, I end up not landing on that 20% chance. So I move onto the second weight, $-0.02$. This time, we hit the 20% chance, so now we swap over. Our next weight is now from $P_2$, which is $0.18$. And so on, until we hit another 20% chance.
We keep doing this until we hit the end of the indexes ($P_1$ and $P_2$ have the same number of indexes, of course).
Is this the correct way to form a child from 2 parents? Is this the correct "crossbreeding" method when it comes to genetic algorithms?
