scholarly journals Grammar-Guided Genetic Programming

Author(s):  
Daniel Manrique ◽  
Juan Ríos ◽  
Alfonso Rodríguez-Patón

Evolutionary computation (EC) is the study of computational systems that borrow ideas from and are inspired by natural evolution and adaptation (Yao & Xu, 2006, pp. 1-18). EC covers a number of techniques based on evolutionary processes and natural selection: evolutionary strategies, genetic algorithms and genetic programming (Keedwell & Narayanan, 2005). Evolutionary strategies are an approach for efficiently solving certain continuous problems, yielding good results for some parametric problems in real domains. Compared with genetic algorithms, evolutionary strategies run more exploratory searches and are a good option when applied to relatively unknown parametric problems. Genetic algorithms emulate the evolutionary process that takes place in nature. Individuals compete for survival by adapting as best they can to the environmental conditions. Crossovers between individuals, mutations and deaths are all part of this process of adaptation. By substituting the natural environment for the problem to be solved, we get a computationally cheap method that is capable of dealing with any problem, provided we know how to determine individuals’ fitness (Manrique, 2001). Genetic programming is an extension of genetic algorithms (Couchet, Manrique, Ríos & Rodríguez- Patón, 2006). Its aim is to build computer programs that are not expressly designed and programmed by a human being. It can be said to be an optimization technique whose search space is composed of all possible computer programs for solving a particular problem. Genetic programming’s key advantage over genetic algorithms is that it can handle individuals (computer programs) of different lengths. Grammar-guided genetic programming (GGGP) is an extension of traditional GP systems (Whigham, 1995, pp. 33-41). The difference lies in the fact that they employ context-free grammars (CFG) that generate all the possible solutions to a given problem as sentences, establishing this way the formal definition of the syntactic problem constraints, and use the derivation trees for each sentence to encode these solutions (Dounias, Tsakonas, Jantzen, Axer, Bjerregard & von Keyserlingk, D. 2002, pp. 494-500). The use of this type of syntactic formalisms helps to solve the so-called closure problem (Whigham, 1996). To achieve closure valid individuals (points that belong to the search space) should always be generated. As the generation of invalid individuals slows down convergence speed a great deal, solving this problem will very much improve the GP search capability. The basic operator directly affecting the closure problem is crossover: crossing two (or any) valid individuals should generate a valid offspring. Similarly, this is the operator that has the biggest impact on the process of convergence towards the optimum solution. Therefore, this article reviews the most important crossover operators employed in GP and GGGP, highlighting the weaknesses existing nowadays in this area of research. We also propose a GGGP system. This system incorporates the original idea of employing ambiguous CFG to overcome these weaknesses, thereby increasing convergence speed and reducing the likelihood of trapping in local optima. Comparative results are shown to empirically corroborate our claims.

2011 ◽  
pp. 2154-2173
Author(s):  
Cândida Ferreira

In this chapter an artificial problem solver inspired in natural genotype/phenotype systems — gene expression programming — is presented. As an introduction, the fundamental differences between gene expression programming and its predecessors, genetic algorithms and genetic programming, are briefly summarized so that the evolutionary advantages of gene expression programming are better understood. The work proceeds with a detailed description of the architecture of the main players of this new algorithm (chromosomes and expression trees), focusing mainly on the interactions between them and how the simple yet revolutionary structure of the chromosomes allows the efficient, unconstrained exploration of the search space. And finally, the chapter closes with an advanced application in which gene expression programming is used to evolve computer programs for diagnosing breast cancer.


Author(s):  
Cândida Ferreira

In this chapter an artificial problem solver inspired in natural genotype/phenotype systems — gene expression programming — is presented. As an introduction, the fundamental differences between gene expression programming and its predecessors, genetic algorithms and genetic programming, are briefly summarized so that the evolutionary advantages of gene expression programming are better understood. The work proceeds with a detailed description of the architecture of the main players of this new algorithm (chromosomes and expression trees), focusing mainly on the interactions between them and how the simple yet revolutionary structure of the chromosomes allows the efficient, unconstrained exploration of the search space. And finally, the chapter closes with an advanced application in which gene expression programming is used to evolve computer programs for diagnosing breast cancer.


2014 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 20-39
Author(s):  
José L. Guerrero ◽  
Antonio Berlanga ◽  
José M. Molina

Diversity in evolutionary algorithms is a critical issue related to the performance obtained during the search process and strongly linked to convergence issues. The lack of the required diversity has been traditionally linked to problematic situations such as early stopping in the presence of local optima (usually faced when the number of individuals in the population is insufficient to deal with the search space). Current proposal introduces a guided mutation operator to cope with these diversity issues, introducing tracking mechanisms of the search space in order to feed the required information to this mutation operator. The objective of the proposed mutation operator is to guarantee a certain degree of coverage over the search space before the algorithm is stopped, attempting to prevent early convergence, which may be introduced by the lack of population diversity. A dynamic mechanism is included in order to determine, in execution time, the degree of application of the technique, adapting the number of cycles when the technique is applied. The results have been tested over a dataset of ten standard single objective functions with different characteristics regarding dimensionality, presence of multiple local optima, search space range and three different dimensionality values, 30D, 300D and 1000D. Thirty different runs have been performed in order to cover the effect of the introduced operator and the statistical relevance of the measured results


Author(s):  
Marcos Gestal ◽  
Julián Dorado

Genetic algorithms (GAs) (Holland, 1975; Goldberg, 1989) try to find the solution for a problem using an initial group of individuals?the population?where each one represents a potential solution. Actually they are successfully applied in very different and actual fields (Yang, Shan, & Bui, 2008; Yu, Davis, Baydar, & Roy, 2008); nevertheless, GAs have some restrictions on a search space with more than a global solution or a unique global solution, together with multiple local optima. A classical GA faced with such a situation tends to focus the search on the surroundings of the global solution; however, it would be interesting to know a higher number of possible solutions for several reasons: precise information about the search space, easy implementation of the local solutions compared with the global one, simple interpretation of certain solutions compared with others, and so forth. To achieve that knowledge, an iterative process will be executed until reaching the desired goals. Such process will start with the grouping of the individuals into species that will independently search a solution in their environments; following, the crossover operation will involve individuals from different species in order not to leave unexplored any search space area. The process will be repeated according to the goals achieved.


2004 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 47-76 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan Rowe ◽  
Darrell Whitley ◽  
Laura Barbulescu ◽  
Jean-Paul Watson

Representations are formalized as encodings that map the search space to the vertex set of a graph. We define the notion of bit equivalent encodings and show that for such encodings the corresponding Walsh coefficients are also conserved. We focus on Gray codes as particular types of encoding and present a review of properties related to the use of Gray codes. Gray codes are widely used in conjunction with genetic algorithms and bit-climbing algorithms for parameter optimization problems. We present new convergence proofs for a special class of unimodal functions; the proofs show that a steepest ascent bit climber using any reflected Gray code representation reaches the global optimum in a number of steps that is linear with respect to the encoding size. There are in fact many different Gray codes.Shifting is defined as a mechanism for dynamically switching from one Gray code representation to another in order to escape local optima. Theoretical results that substantially improve our understanding of the Gray codes and the shifting mechanism are presented. New proofs also shed light on the number of unique Gray code neighborhoods accessible via shifting and on how neighborhood structure changes during shifting. We show that shifting can improve the performance of both a local search algorithm as well as one of the best genetic algorithms currently available.


2008 ◽  
Vol 2008 ◽  
pp. 1-6 ◽  
Author(s):  
P. J. Williams ◽  
T. C. A. Molteno

This work compares the performance of genetic programming (GP) against traditional fixed-length genome GA approaches on the optimization of wire antenna designs. We describe the implementation of a GP electromagnetic optimization system for wire structures. The results are compared with the traditional GA approach. Although the dimensionality of the search space is much higher for GP than GA, we find that the GP approach gives better results than GA for the same computational effort. In addition, we find that a more expressive antenna structure grammar, dramatically, improves the performance of the GP approach.


Author(s):  
Chang-Wook Han ◽  
◽  
Hajime Nobuhara ◽  

Genetic algorithms (GA) are well known and very popular stochastic optimization algorithm. Although, GA is very powerful method to find the global optimum, it has some drawbacks, for example, premature convergence to local optima, slow convergence speed to global optimum. To enhance the performance of the GA, this paper proposes an adaptive genetic algorithm based on partitioning method. The partitioning method, which enables a genetic algorithm to find a solution very effectively, adaptively divides the search space into promising sub-spaces to reduce the complexity of optimization. This partitioning method is more effective as the complexity of the search space is increasing. The validity of the proposed method is confirmed by applying it to several bench mark test function examples and a traveling salesman problem.


Author(s):  
Prachi Agrawal ◽  
Talari Ganesh ◽  
Ali Wagdy Mohamed

AbstractThis article proposes a novel binary version of recently developed Gaining Sharing knowledge-based optimization algorithm (GSK) to solve binary optimization problems. GSK algorithm is based on the concept of how humans acquire and share knowledge during their life span. A binary version of GSK named novel binary Gaining Sharing knowledge-based optimization algorithm (NBGSK) depends on mainly two binary stages: binary junior gaining sharing stage and binary senior gaining sharing stage with knowledge factor 1. These two stages enable NBGSK for exploring and exploitation of the search space efficiently and effectively to solve problems in binary space. Moreover, to enhance the performance of NBGSK and prevent the solutions from trapping into local optima, NBGSK with population size reduction (PR-NBGSK) is introduced. It decreases the population size gradually with a linear function. The proposed NBGSK and PR-NBGSK applied to set of knapsack instances with small and large dimensions, which shows that NBGSK and PR-NBGSK are more efficient and effective in terms of convergence, robustness, and accuracy.


Author(s):  
Abdullah Türk ◽  
Dursun Saral ◽  
Murat Özkök ◽  
Ercan Köse

Outfitting is a critical stage in the shipbuilding process. Within the outfitting, the construction of pipe systems is a phase that has a significant effect on time and cost. While cutting the pipes required for the pipe systems in shipyards, the cutting process is usually performed randomly. This can result in large amounts of trim losses. In this paper, we present an approach to minimize these losses. With the proposed method it is aimed to base the pipe cutting process on a specific systematic. To solve this problem, Genetic Algorithms (GA), which gives successful results in solving many problems in the literature, have been used. Different types of genetic operators have been used to investigate the search space of the problem well. The results obtained have proven the effectiveness of the proposed approach.


Author(s):  
H S Ismail ◽  
K K B Hon

The general two-dimensional cutting stock problem is concerned with the optimum layout and arrangement of two-dimensional shapes within the spatial constraints imposed by the cutting stock. The main objective is to maximize the utilization of the cutting stock material. This paper presents some of the results obtained from applying a combination of genetic algorithms and heuristic approaches to the nesting of dissimilar shapes. Genetic algorithms are stochastically based optimization approaches which mimic nature's evolutionary process in finding global optimal solutions in a large search space. The paper discusses the method by which the problem is defined and represented for analysis and introduces a number of new problem-specific genetic algorithm operators that aid in the rapid conversion to an optimum solution.


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