Generalisation enhancement via input space transformation: A GP approach

Abstract

This paper proposes a new approach to improve generalisation of standard regression techniques when there are hundreds or thousands of input variables. The input space X is composed of observational data of the form (xi, y(xi)), i = 1…n where each xi denotes a k-dimensional input vector of design variables and y is the response. Genetic Programming (GP) is used to transform the original input space X into a new input space Z = (zi, y(zi)) that has smaller input vector and is easier to be mapped into its corresponding responses. GP is designed to evolve a function that receives the original input vector from each xi in the original input space as input and return a new vector zi as an output. Each element in the newly evolved zi vector is generated from an evolved mathematical formula that extracts statistical features from the original input space. To achieve this, we designed GP trees to produce multiple outputs. Empirical evaluation of 20 different problems revealed that the new approach is able to significantly reduce the dimensionality of the original input space and improve the performance of standard approximation models such as Kriging, Radial Basis Functions Networks, and Linear Regression, and GP (as a regression techniques). In addition, results demonstrate that the new approach is better than standard dimensionality reduction techniques such as Principle Component Analysis (PCA). Moreover, the results show that the proposed approach is able to improve the performance of standard Linear Regression and make it competitive to other stochastic regression techniques.