Automatic Creation of Taxonomies of Genetic Programming Systems

  • Authors:

  • Mario Graff;Riccardo Poli

  • Affiliations:

  • School of Computer Science and Electronic Engineering, University of Essex, UK;School of Computer Science and Electronic Engineering, University of Essex, UK

  • Venue:
  • EuroGP '09 Proceedings of the 12th European Conference on Genetic Programming
  • Year:
  • 2009

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Abstract

A few attempts to create taxonomies in evolutionary computation have been made. These either group algorithms or group problems on the basis of their similarities. Similarity is typically evaluated by manually analysing algorithms/problems to identify key characteristics that are then used as a basis to form the groups of a taxonomy. This task is not only very tedious but it is also rather subjective. As a consequence the resulting taxonomies lack universality and are sometimes even questionable. In this paper we present a new and powerful approach to the construction of taxonomies and we apply it to Genetic Programming (GP). Only one manually constructed taxonomy of problems has been proposed in GP before, while no GP algorithm taxonomy has ever been suggested. Our approach is entirely automated and objective. We apply it to the problem of grouping GP systems with their associated parameter settings. We do this on the basis of performance signatures which represent the behaviour of each system across a class of problems. These signatures are obtained thorough a process which involves the instantiation of models of GP's performance. We test the method on a large class of Boolean induction problems.