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European Conference on Genetic Programming

EuroGP 2014: Genetic Programming pp 186–197Cite as

The Best Things Don’t Always Come in Small Packages: Constant Creation in Grammatical Evolution

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNTCS,volume 8599))

Abstract

This paper evaluates the performance of various methods to constant creation in Grammatical Evolution (GE), and validates the results against those from Genetic Programming (GP). Constant creation in GE is an important issue due to the disruptive nature of ripple crossover, which can radically remap multiple terminals in an individual, and we investigate if more compact methods, which are more similar to the GP style of constant creation (Ephemeral Random Constants (ERCs), perform better.

The results are surprising. The GE methods all perform significantly better than GP on unseen test data, and we demonstrate that the standard GE approach of digit concatenation does not produce individuals that are any larger than those from methods which are designed to use less genetic material.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. CSIS Department, University of Limerick, Ireland

    R. Muhammad Atif Azad & Conor Ryan

Authors
  1. R. Muhammad Atif Azad
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  2. Conor Ryan
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. University College Dublin, UCD CASL, Belfield, Dublin 4, Ireland

    Miguel Nicolau

  2. Institute of Computing Science, Poznan University of Technology, Piotowo 2, 60-965, Poznań, Poland

    Krzysztof Krawiec

  3. Faculty of Computer Science, Dalhousie University, University Avenue 6050, B3H 1W5, Halifax, NS, Canada

    Malcolm I. Heywood

  4. Instituto Superior de Estatística e Gestão de Informaticão, Universidade Nova de Lisboa, 1070-312, Lisbon, Portugal

    Mauro Castelli

  5. Departamento de Arquitectura y Tecnología de Computadores (ETS), Universidad de Granada, 18071, Granada, Spain

    Pablo García-Sánchez  & Juan J. Merelo  & 

  6. Departamento de Informática, Universidad de Jaén, 23071, Jaén, Spain

    Victor M. Rivas Santos

  7. Institute for Informatics and Digital Innovation, Edinburgh Napier University, Merchiston Campus, EH10 5DT, Edinburgh, UK

    Kevin Sim

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Azad, R.M.A., Ryan, C. (2014). The Best Things Don’t Always Come in Small Packages: Constant Creation in Grammatical Evolution. In: Nicolau, M., et al. Genetic Programming. EuroGP 2014. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 8599. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-44303-3_16

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-44303-3_16

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-662-44302-6

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-662-44303-3

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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