An evolutionary algorithm for global induction of regression trees

Abstract

In the paper a new evolutionary algorithm for induction of univariate regression trees is proposed. In contrast to typical top-down approaches it globally searches for the best tree structure and tests in internal nodes. The population of initial trees is created with diverse top-down methods on randomly chosen sub-samples of the training data. Specialized genetic operators allow the algorithm to efficiently evolve regression trees. The complexity term introduced in the fitness function helps to mitigate the over-fitting problem. The preliminary experimental validation is promising as the resulting trees can be significantly less complex with at least comparable performance to the classical top-down counterpart. © 2010 Springer-Verlag.