Genetic programming and domain knowledge: Beyond the limitations of grammar-guided machine discovery

Abstract

Application of Genetic Programming to the discovery of empirical laws is often impaired by the huge size of the domains involved. In physical applications, dimensional analysis is a powerful way to trim out the size of these spaces This paper presents a way of enforcing dimensional constraints through formal grammars in the GP framework. As one major limitation for grammar-guided GP comes from the initialization procedure (how to find admissible and sufficiently diverse trees with a limited depth), an initialization procedure based on dynamic grammar pruning is proposed. The approach is validated on the problem of identification of a materials response to a mechanical test. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2000.