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Unsure when to stop?: ask your semantic neighbors

Published:01 July 2017Publication History

ABSTRACT

In iterative supervised learning algorithms it is common to reach a point in the search where no further induction seems to be possible with the available data. If the search is continued beyond this point, the risk of overfitting increases significantly. Following the recent developments in inductive semantic stochastic methods, this paper studies the feasibility of using information gathered from the semantic neighborhood to decide when to stop the search. Two semantic stopping criteria are proposed and experimentally assessed in Geometric Semantic Genetic Programming (GSGP) and in the Semantic Learning Machine (SLM) algorithm (the equivalent algorithm for neural networks). The experiments are performed on real-world high-dimensional regression datasets. The results show that the proposed semantic stopping criteria are able to detect stopping points that result in a competitive generalization for both GSGP and SLM. This approach also yields computationally efficient algorithms as it allows the evolution of neural networks in less than 3 seconds on average, and of GP trees in at most 10 seconds. The usage of the proposed semantic stopping criteria in conjunction with the computation of optimal mutation/learning steps also results in small trees and neural networks.

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  • Published in

    cover image ACM Conferences
    GECCO '17: Proceedings of the Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference
    July 2017
    1427 pages
    ISBN:9781450349208
    DOI:10.1145/3071178

    Copyright © 2017 ACM

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    Association for Computing Machinery

    New York, NY, United States

    Publication History

    • Published: 1 July 2017

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    GECCO '17 Paper Acceptance Rate178of462submissions,39%Overall Acceptance Rate1,669of4,410submissions,38%

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