GOMGE: Gene-pool optimal mixing on grammatical evolution

Abstract

Gene-pool Optimal Mixing Evolutionary Algorithm (GOMEA) is a recent Evolutionary Algorithm (EA) in which the interactions among parts of the solution (i.e., the linkage) are learned and exploited in a novel variation operator. We present GOMGE, the extension of GOMEA to Grammatical Evolution (GE), a popular EA based on an indirect representation which may be applied to any problem whose solutions can be described using a context-free grammar (CFG). GE is a general approach that does not require the user to tune the internals of the EA to fit the problem at hand: there is hence the opportunity for benefiting from the potential of GOMEA to automatically learn and exploit the linkage. We apply the proposed approach to three variants of GE differing in the representation (original GE, SGE, and WHGE) and incorporate in GOMGE two specific improvements aimed at coping with the high degeneracy of those representations. We experimentally assess GOMGE and show that, when coupled with WHGE and SGE, it is clearly beneficial to both effectiveness and efficiency, whereas it delivers mixed results with the original GE.