Explicit control of diversity and effective variation distance in linear genetic programming

Abstract

We have investigated structural distance metrics for linear genetic programs. Causal connections between changes of the genotype and changes of the phenotype form a necessary condition for analyzing structural differences between genetic programs and for the two objectives of this paper: (i) Distance information between individuals is used to control structural diversity of population individuals actively by a two-level tournament selection. (ii) Variation distance is controlled on the effective code for different genetic operators – including a mutation operator that works closely with the applied distance metric. Numerous experiments have been performed for three benchmark problems.