Abstract
Lévy flights are a class of random walks inspired directly by observing animal foraging habits, in which the stride length is drawn from a power-law distribution. This implies that the vast majority of the strides will be short. However, on rare occasions, the stride are gigantic. We use this technique to self-adapt the mutation rate used in Linear Genetic Programming. We apply this original approach to three different classes of problems: Boolean regression, quadratic polynomial regression, and surface reconstruction. We find that in all cases, our method outperforms the generic, commonly used constant mutation rate of 1 over the size of the genotype. We compare different common values of the power-law exponent to the regular spectrum of constant values used habitually. We conclude that our novel method is a viable alternative to constant mutation rate, especially because it tends to reduce the number of parameters of genetic programing.
Authors contributions are all equal. Names appear in alphabetical order.
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Darabos, C., Giacobini, M., Hu, T., Moore, J.H. (2012). Lévy-Flight Genetic Programming: Towards a New Mutation Paradigm. In: Giacobini, M., Vanneschi, L., Bush, W.S. (eds) Evolutionary Computation, Machine Learning and Data Mining in Bioinformatics. EvoBIO 2012. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 7246. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-29066-4_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-29066-4_4
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