abstract = "Transfer learning is a process in which a system can
apply knowledge and skills learned in previous tasks to
novel tasks. This technique has emerged as a new
framework to enhance the performance of learning
methods in machine learning. Surprisingly, transfer
learning has not deservedly received the attention from
the Genetic Programming research community. In this
paper, we propose several transfer learning methods for
Genetic Programming (GP). These methods were
implemented by transferring a number of good
individuals or sub-individuals from the source to the
target problem. They were tested on two families of
symbolic regression problems. The experimental results
showed that transfer learning methods help GP to
achieve better training errors. Importantly, the
performance of GP on unseen data when implemented with
transfer learning was also considerably improved.
Furthermore, the impact of transfer learning to GP code
bloat was examined that showed that limiting the size
of transferred individuals helps to reduce the code
growth problem in GP.",