Online Diversity Control in Symbolic Regression via a Fast Hash-based Tree Similarity Measure

Diversity represents an important aspect of genetic programming, being directly correlated with search performance. When considered at the genotype level, diversity often requires expensive tree distance measures which have a negative impact on the algorithm's runtime performance. In this work we introduce a fast, hash-based tree distance measure to massively speed-up the calculation of population diversity during the algorithmic run. We combine this measure with the standard GA and the NSGA-II genetic algorithms to steer the search towards higher diversity. We validate the approach on a collection of benchmark problems for symbolic regression where our method consistently outperforms the standard GA as well as NSGA-II configurations with different secondary objectives.Comment: 8 pages, conference, submitted to congress on evolutionary computatio

On the Use of Dynamic GP Fitness Cases in Static and Dynamic Optimisation Problems

In Genetic Programming (GP), the fitness of individuals is normally computed by using a set of fitness cases (FCs). Research on the use of FCs in GP has primarily focused on how to reduce the size of these sets. However, often, only a small set of FCs is available and there is no need to reduce it. In this work, we are interested in using the whole FCs set, but rather than adopting the commonly used GP approach of presenting the entire set of FCs to the system from the beginning of the search, referred as static FCs, we allow the GP system to build it by aggregation over time, named as dynamic FCs, with the hope to make the search more amenable. Moreover, there is no study on the use of FCs in Dynamic Optimisation Problems (DOPs). To this end, we also use the Kendall Tau Distance (KTD) approach, which quantifies pairwise dissimilarities among two lists of fitness values. KTD aims to capture the degree of a change in DOPs and we use this to promote structural diversity. Results on eight symbolic regression functions indicate that both approaches are highly beneficial in GP