Semantic crossover based on the partial derivative error

Abstract

There is great interest for the development of semantic genetic operators to improve the performance of genetic programming. Semantic genetic operators have traditionally been developed employing experimentally or theoretically-based approaches. Our current work proposes a novel semantic crossover developed amid the two traditional approaches. Our proposed semantic crossover operator is based on the use of the derivative of the error propagated through the tree. This process decides the crossing point of the second parent. The results show that our procedure improves the performance of genetic programming on rational symbolic regression problems.