On the Bias of Syntactic Geometric Recombination in Genetic Programming and Grammatical Evolution
Ann Thorhauer, Franz Rothlauf · 2015
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 recombination operators for GE and GP are not geometric.