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Uniform Subtree Mutation

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Book cover Genetic Programming (EuroGP 2002)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCS,volume 2278))

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Abstract

The traditional genetic programming crossover and mutation operators have the property that they tend to affect smaller and smaller fractions of a solution tree as the tree grows larger. It is generally thought that this property contributes to the ‘code bloat’ problem, in which evolving solution trees rapidly become unmanageably large, and researchers have investigated alternate operators designed to avoid this effect. We introduce one such operator, called uniform subtree mutation (USM), and investigate its performance—alone and in combination with traditional crossover-on six standard problems. We measure its behavior using both computational effort and size effort, a variation that takes tree size into account. Our tests show that genetic programming using pure USM reduces evolved tree sizes dramatically, compared to crossover, but does impact solution quality somewhat. In some cases, however, a combination of USM and crossover yielded both smaller trees and superior performance, as measured both by size effort and traditional metrics.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM, USA

    Terry Van Belle & David H. Ackley

Authors
  1. Terry Van Belle
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  2. David H. Ackley
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

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

    James A. Foster

  2. INRIA Rocquencourt, B.P. 105, 78153, Le Chesnay Cedex, France

    Evelyne Lutton

  3. School of Computer Science, University of Birmingham, B15 2TT, Birmingham, UK

    Julian Miller

  4. Department of Computer Science and Information Systems, University of Limerick, Schuman Building, Limerick, Ireland

    Conor Ryan

  5. Dip. Tecnologie dell’Informazione, Università degli Studi di Milano, Via Bramante 65, 26013, Crema, Italy

    Andrea Tettamanzi

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© 2002 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Van Belle, T., Ackley, D.H. (2002). Uniform Subtree Mutation. In: Foster, J.A., Lutton, E., Miller, J., Ryan, C., Tettamanzi, A. (eds) Genetic Programming. EuroGP 2002. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 2278. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-45984-7_15

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-45984-7_15

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-43378-1

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-45984-2

  • eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive

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