A simple powerful constraint for genetic programming

Abstract

This paper demonstrates the ability of Hereditary Repulsion to perform well on a range of diverse problem domains. Furthermore, we show that HR is practically invulnerable to the effects to overfitting and does not suffer a loss of generalisation, even in the late stages of evolution. We trace the source of this high quality performance to a pleasingly simple constraint at the heart of the HR algorithm. We confirm its effectiveness by incorporating the constraint into one of the benchmark systems, observing substantial improvements in the quality of generalisation in the evolved population. © 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.