0000000000445049
AUTHOR
Ann Thorhauer
On the Locality of Standard Search Operators in Grammatical Evolution
Offspring should be similar to their parents and inherit their relevant properties. This general design principle of search operators in evolutionary algorithms is either known as locality or geometry of search operators, respectively. It takes a geometric perspective on search operators and suggests that the distance between an offspring and its parents should be less than or equal to the distance between both parents. This paper examines the locality of standard search operators used in grammatical evolution (GE) and genetic programming (GP) for binary tree problems. Both standard GE and GP search operators suffer from low locality since a substantial number of search steps result in an o…
On the Non-uniform Redundancy in Grammatical Evolution
This paper investigates the redundancy of representation in grammatical evolution (GE) for binary trees. We analyze the entire GE solution space by creating all binary genotypes of predefined length and map them to phenotype trees, which are then characterized by their size, depth and shape. We find that the GE representation is strongly non-uniformly redundant. There are huge differences in the number of genotypes that encode one particular phenotype. Thus, it is difficult for GE to solve problems where the optimal tree solutions are underrepresented. In general, the GE mapping process is biased towards short tree structures, which implies high GE performance if the optimal solution requir…
Structural difficulty in grammatical evolution versus genetic programming
Genetic programming (GP) has problems with structural difficulty as it is unable to search effectively for solutions requiring very full or very narrow trees. As a result of structural difficulty, GP has a bias towards narrow trees which means it searches effectively for solutions requiring narrow trees. This paper focuses on the structural difficulty of grammatical evolution (GE). In contrast to GP, GE works on variable-length binary strings and uses a grammar in Backus-Naur Form (BNF) to map linear genotypes to phenotype trees. The paper studies whether and how GE is affected by structural difficulty. For the analysis, we perform random walks through the search space and compare the struc…
On the Bias of Syntactic Geometric Recombination in Genetic Programming and Grammatical Evolution
For fixed-length binary representations as used in genetic algorithms, standard recombination operators (e.g.,~one-point crossover) are unbiased. Thus, the application of recombination only reshuffles the alleles and does not change the statistical properties in the population. Using a geometric view on recombination operators, most search operators for fixed-length strings are geometric, which means that the distances between offspring and their parents are less than, or equal to, the distance between their parents. In genetic programming (GP) and grammatical evolution (GE), the situation is different since the recombination operators are applied to variable-length structures. Thus, most r…
On the Non-uniform Redundancy of Representations for Grammatical Evolution: The Influence of Grammars
The representation used in grammatical evolution (GE) is non-uniformly redundant as some phenotypes are represented by more genotypes than others. This article studies how the non-uniform redundancy of the GE representation depends on various types of grammars. When constructing the phenotype tree from a genotype, the used grammar determines Bavg, the average branching factor. Bavg measures the expected number of non-terminals chosen when mapping one genotype codon to a phenotype tree node. First, the paper illustrates that the GE representation induces a bias towards small trees. This bias gets stronger with lower Bavg. For example, when using a grammar with Bavg = 0.5, 75% of all genotype…