Integrating categorical variables with multiobjective genetic programming for classifier construction

  • Authors:
  • Khaled Badran;Peter Rockett

  • Affiliations:
  • Laboratory for Information and Vision Engineering, Department of Electronic and Electrical Engineering, The University of Sheffield, Sheffield, UK;Laboratory for Information and Vision Engineering, Department of Electronic and Electrical Engineering, The University of Sheffield, Sheffield, UK

  • Venue:
  • EuroGP'08 Proceedings of the 11th European conference on Genetic programming
  • Year:
  • 2008

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Abstract

Genetic programming (GP) has proved successful at evolving pattern classifiers and although the paradigm lends itself easily to continuous pattern attributes, incorporating categorical attributes is little studied. Here we construct two synthetic datasets specifically to investigate the use of categorical attributes in GP and consider two possible approaches: indicator variables and integer mapping. We conclude that for ordered attributes, integer mapping yields the lowest errors. For purely nominal attributes, indicator variables give the best misclassification errors.