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Structured Grammatical Evolution: A Dynamic Approach

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Handbook of Grammatical Evolution

Abstract

Grammars have attracted the attention of researchers within the Evolutionary Computation field, specially from the Genetic Programming community. The most successful example of the use of grammars by GP is Grammatical Evolution (GE). In spite of being widely used by practitioners of different fields, GE is not free from drawbacks. The ones that are most commonly pointed out are those linked with redundancy and locality of the representation. To address these limitations Structured Grammatical Evolution (SGE) was proposed, which introduces a one-to-one mapping between the genotype and the non-terminals. In SGE the input grammar must be pre-processed so that recursion is removed, and the maximum number of expansion possibilities for each symbol determined. This has been pointed out as a drawback of SGE and to tackle it we introduce Dynamic Structured Grammatical Evolution (DSGE). In DSGE there is no need to pre-process the grammar, as it is expanded on the fly during the evolutionary process, and thus we only need to define the maximum tree depth. Additionally, it only encodes the integers that are used in the genotype to phenotype mapping, and grows as needed during evolution. Experiments comparing DSGE with SGE show that DSGE performance is never worse than SGE, being statistically superior in a considerable number of the tested problems.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The implementations of SGE and DSGE are available at: SGE—https://github.com/nunolourenco/sge and DSGE—https://github.com/nunolourenco/dsge.

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Acknowledgements

This research is partially funded by: Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia (FCT), Portugal, under the grant SFRH/BD/114865/2016. We gratefully acknowledge the support of NVIDIA Corporation for the donation of a Titan X GPU. We would also like to thank Tiago Martins for all the patience making the charts herein presented.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. CISUC, Department of Informatics Engineering, University of Coimbra, Coimbra, Portugal

    Nuno Lourenço, Filipe Assunção, Ernesto Costa & Penousal Machado

  2. CISUC, Department of Informatics Engineering, University of Coimbra, Coimbra, Portugal

    Francisco B. Pereira

  3. Polytechnic Institute of Coimbra, Quinta da Nora, Coimbra, Portugal

    Francisco B. Pereira

Authors
  1. Nuno Lourenço
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  2. Filipe Assunção
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  3. Francisco B. Pereira
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  4. Ernesto Costa
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  5. Penousal Machado
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Nuno Lourenço .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science and Information Systems, University of Limerick, Castletroy, Limerick, Ireland

    Conor Ryan

  2. School of Business, University College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland

    Michael O'Neill

  3. Department of Computer Science and Information Systems, University of Limerick, Castletroy, Limerick, Ireland

    JJ Collins

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Lourenço, N., Assunção, F., Pereira, F.B., Costa, E., Machado, P. (2018). Structured Grammatical Evolution: A Dynamic Approach. In: Ryan, C., O'Neill, M., Collins, J. (eds) Handbook of Grammatical Evolution. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-78717-6_6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-78717-6_6

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

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  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-78717-6

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