abstract = "In a recent contribution we have introduced a new
implementation of geometric semantic operators for
Genetic Programming. Thanks to this implementation, we
are now able to deeply investigate their usefulness and
study their properties on complex real-life
applications. Our experiments confirm that these
operators are more effective than traditional ones in
optimising training data, due to the fact that they
induce a unimodal fitness landscape. Furthermore, they
automatically limit over fitting, something we had
already noticed in our recent contribution, and that is
further discussed here. Finally, we investigate the
influence of some parameters on the effectiveness of
these operators, and we show that tuning their values
and setting them a-priori may be wasted effort.
Instead, if we randomly modify the values of those
parameters several times during the evolution, we
obtain a performance that is comparable with the one
obtained with the best setting, both on training and
test data for all the studied problems.",