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A semantic genetic programming framework based on dynamic targets

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Abstract

Semantic GP is a promising branch of GP that introduces semantic awareness during genetic evolution to improve various aspects of GP. This paper presents a new Semantic GP approach based on Dynamic Target (SGP-DT) that divides the search problem into multiple GP runs. The evolution in each run is guided by a new (dynamic) target based on the residual errors of previous runs. To obtain the final solution, SGP-DT combines the solutions of each run using linear scaling. SGP-DT presents a new methodology to produce the offspring that does not rely on the classic crossover. The synergy between such a methodology and linear scaling yields final solutions with low approximation error and computational cost. We evaluate SGP-DT on eleven well-known data sets and compare with \(\epsilon\)-lexicase, a state-of-the-art evolutionary technique, and seven Machine Learning techniques. SGP-DT achieves small RMSE values, on average 23.19% smaller than the one of \(\epsilon\)-lexicase. Tuning SGP-DT ’s configuration greatly reduces the computational cost while still obtaining competitive results.

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Notes

  1. \(f(x)=10/(5 + \sum _{i=1}^{5} (x_i -3)^2)\).

  2. https://github.com/EpistasisLab/ellyn.

  3. calculated with \(((M_T- M_D)/M_T) \cdot 100\), where \(M_D\) is the median RMSE of SGP-DT and \(M_T\) is the one of the competing technique.

  4. for readability reasons we omitted 4 out-layers for lasso, 13 for \(\epsilon\)-lexicase, 30 for SGP-DT, 30 for DT-NM and 35 for DT-EM.

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National Institute of Health Grant NIH R01 LM010098.

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Ruberto, S., Terragni, V. & Moore, J.H. A semantic genetic programming framework based on dynamic targets. Genet Program Evolvable Mach 22, 463–493 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10710-021-09419-3

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