Finding Diverse Examples with Genetic Algorithms

A number of real-world problems can be seen as instances of the general problem of emphfinding qualitative examples. In such a problem we know how to classify objects from a set into a large number of classes, and we would like to find one specific example for each class. In this paper we outline a number of problems which fit into this category, and analyse some of the requirements for a general heuristic for this category of problem. We then develop a heuristic for this type of problem, based on genetic algorithms, and investigate the application of this heuristic to some test problems.