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European Conference on Genetic Programming

EuroGP 2003: Genetic Programming pp 204–217Cite as

A Simple but Theoretically-Motivated Method to Control Bloat in Genetic Programming

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCS,volume 2610))

Abstract

This paper presents a simple method to control bloat which is based on the idea of strategically and dynamically creating fitness “holes” in the fitness landscape which repel the population. In particular we create holes by zeroing the fitness of a certain proportion of the offspring that have above average length. Unlike other methods where all individuals are penalised when length constraints are violated, here we randomly penalise only a fixed proportion of all the constraintviolating offspring. The paper describes the theoretical foundation for this method and reports the results of its empirical validation with two relatively hard test problems, which has confirmed the effectiveness of the approach.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, University of Essex, Essex

    Riccardo Poli

Authors
  1. Riccardo Poli
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Computer Science and Information Systems, University of Limerick, Limerick, Ireland

    Conor Ryan

  2. Department of Computer Science, University of Idaho, 83844-1010, Moscow, ID, USA

    Terence Soule

  3. Department of Computer Science, Free University of Amsterdam, 1081, HV Amsterdam, The Netherlands

    Maarten Keijzer

  4. Department of Computer Science, University of Essex, Wivenhoe Park, CO4 3SQ, Colchester, UK

    Edward Tsang  & Riccardo Poli  & 

  5. Department of Computer Science, University of Coimbra, Polo II, Pinhal Marrocos, 3030-290, Coimbra, Portugal

    Ernesto Costa

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© 2003 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Poli, R. (2003). A Simple but Theoretically-Motivated Method to Control Bloat in Genetic Programming. In: Ryan, C., Soule, T., Keijzer, M., Tsang, E., Poli, R., Costa, E. (eds) Genetic Programming. EuroGP 2003. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 2610. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-36599-0_19

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-36599-0_19

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-00971-9

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-36599-0

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