GA | R Observatory

Overview

About

Maintained by Luca ScruccaFirst published 2012-06-2216 releasesCRAN page ↗GitHub ↗

Flexible general-purpose toolbox implementing genetic algorithms (GAs) for stochastic optimisation. Binary, real-valued, and permutation representations are available to optimize a fitness function, i.e. a function provided by users depending on their objective function. Several genetic operators are available and can be combined to explore the best settings for the current task. Furthermore, users can define new genetic operators and easily evaluate their performances. Local search using general-purpose optimisation algorithms can be applied stochastically to exploit interesting regions. GAs can be run sequentially or in parallel, using an explicit master-slave parallelisation or a coarse-grain islands approach. For more details see Scrucca (2013) doi:10.18637/jss.v053.i04 and Scrucca (2017) doi:10.32614/RJ-2017-008.

Install

R (CRAN)pak (dev)Ubuntu (r2u)Fedora (COPR)openSUSE (OBS)

install.packages("GA", repos = "https://cloud.r-project.org/")

Installs the current CRAN release. Prebuilt binaries on Windows and macOS.

if (!requireNamespace("pak", quietly = TRUE))
  install.packages("pak", repos = "https://cloud.r-project.org/")
pak::pak("luca-scr/GA")

Development version from luca-scr/GA. Installs pak first if it is not already available.

Release

# enable cranapt (r2u) if it is not already set up, then install
grep -rqs r2u.stat.illinois.edu /etc/apt/sources.list /etc/apt/sources.list.d/ \
  || curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/eddelbuettel/r2u/master/inst/scripts/add_cranapt_noble.sh | sudo bash
sudo apt install -y r-cran-ga

Fast Ubuntu binaries via r2u (no compilation). The cranapt setup runs once and is skipped when it is already enabled.

bspm (used by r2u) also needs make: sudo apt install make

# enable the iucar/cran COPR if it is not already present, then install
ls /etc/yum.repos.d/*iucar*cran*.repo >/dev/null 2>&1 \
  || sudo dnf copr enable -y iucar/cran
sudo dnf install -y R-CRAN-GA

RPMs from the iucar/cran COPR, rebuilt from CRAN.

For install.packages() integration in R, also: sudo dnf install R-CoprManager

# add the autoCRAN OBS repo (Tumbleweed) if it is missing, then install
zypper -q lr | grep -qi autoCRAN \
  || sudo zypper addrepo https://download.opensuse.org/repositories/devel:/languages:/R:/autoCRAN/openSUSE_Tumbleweed/devel:languages:R:autoCRAN.repo
sudo zypper install -y R-GA

RPMs auto-built from CRAN on openSUSE OBS (Tumbleweed).

Health

CRAN checks

13OK

Slowest check: 3.3 min · r-oldrel-windows-x86_64

Code health

None

Tests · ratio 0.00

not tracked

Coverage

100%

Documentation · exports

10

Dependencies · direct

Check history

OK2026-04-25
12 OK · 0 NOTE · 0 WARNING · 0 ERROR · 0 FAILURE
NOTE2026-04-22
11 OK · 3 NOTE · 0 WARNING · 0 ERROR · 0 FAILURE
ERROR2026-04-18
10 OK · 3 NOTE · 0 WARNING · 1 ERROR · 0 FAILURE
NOTE2026-03-10
11 OK · 3 NOTE · 0 WARNING · 0 ERROR · 0 FAILURE

Documentation

READMEYes · 234 wordsVignettesYes · dynamicpkgdown siteNoNEWSYes · 100% structuredCode of conductNoContributing guideNo

Examples that run: 89%
Documented parameters: 74%
Return-value docs: 95%
References docs: 75%

Downloads

130.7K

CRAN downloads in the past year

Rank #1,274 · ~358/day · ~10.9K/mo

Releases R versions

Daily download trend is not available in this view yet.

6.9K30 days

27.2K90 days

130.7K1 year

Compare downloads with other packages →

Also on925 r2u35 autocran5.4K conda_forge103 c2d4u

Repository

GitHub ↗ luca-scr/ga

99Stars

31Forks

13Open issues

3Open PRs

0Releases

51Commits

4Contributors

genetic-algorithmoptimisationr

51 commits · Last activity 2026-01-07 · +2.1% stars, 30d

Stars over time

2025-02-06 · 892026-07-07 · 99

Repository practices

Upstream repositoryBeta

2 development-tooling and community-health practices detected across 2 families in the upstream repository

Checks run against github.com/luca-scr/ga on 2026-07-19.

CRAN release process (1)

cran-comments.md

Lint, format, editor (1)

RStudio project

How this is detected·Detection ruleset v1 (2026-07-18)

Dependencies

Declared dependencies

11 external dependencies (excludes base and recommended)

Depends (4)

R >= 3.4methodsforeach iterators

Imports (7)

statsgraphicsgrDevicesutilscli crayon Rcpp

LinkingTo (2)

Rcpp RcppArmadillo

Suggests (5)

paralleldoParallel doRNG knitr rmarkdown

Enhances (0)

none

Dependency license breakdown →

Reverse dependencies

51direct

7indirect

and 3 more packages.

People & History

People (1)

Maintainer (1)

Luca Scrucca

Author, Maintainer

Authors (1)

Luca Scrucca

Author, Maintainer

Package Timeline

16 releases. Pick two to compare their code metrics. R releases are shown for context.

R
R 4.6.0 released · 2026-04-24
3.2.5Latest
2026-01-08 · current release · diff ↗
R
R 4.5.0 released · 2025-04-11
R
R 4.4.0 released · 2024-04-24
3.2.4
2024-01-28 · diff ↗
R
R 4.3.0 released · 2023-04-21
3.2.3
2022-10-19 · diff ↗
R
R 4.2.0 released · 2022-04-22
3.2.2
2021-10-15 · diff ↗
R
R 4.1.0 released · 2021-05-18
3.2.1
2021-04-21 · diff ↗
R
R 4.0.0 released · 2020-04-24
R
R 3.6.0 released · 2019-04-26
3.2
2019-01-10 · diff ↗
3.1.1
2018-05-11 · diff ↗
3.1
2018-05-09 · diff ↗

Show 15 earlier events

R
R 3.5.0 released · 2018-04-23
R
R 3.4.0 released · 2017-04-21
3.0.2
2016-06-07 · diff ↗
3.0.1
2016-05-16 · diff ↗
3.0
2016-05-10 · diff ↗
R
R 3.3.0 released · 2016-05-03
R
R 3.2.0 released · 2015-04-16
2.2
2014-10-15 · diff ↗
2.1
2014-05-06 · diff ↗
R
R 3.1.0 released · 2014-04-10
2.0
2013-08-20 · diff ↗
1.1
2013-04-08 · diff ↗
R
R 3.0.0 released · 2013-04-03
1.0
2012-06-22
R
R 2.15.0 released · 2012-03-30

Package metadata

First published: 2012-06-22
Total releases: 16 / 14 yrs
License: GPL (>= 2) OSI
Minimum R: ≥ 3.4
Download size: 4.8 MB
Installed size: not tracked yet
With dependencies: not tracked yet

Appears in task views

Optimization and Mathematical Programming