On the locality of grammatical evolution

Abstract

This paper investigates the locality of the genotype-phenotype mapping (representation) used in grammatical evolution (GE). The results show that the representation used in GE has problems with locality as many neighboring genotypes do not correspond to neighboring phenotypes. Experiments with a simple local search strategy reveal that the GE representation leads to lower performance for mutation-based search approaches in comparison to standard GP representations. The results suggest that locality issues should be considered for further development of the representation used in GE. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2006.