A comparative study of an evolvability indicator and a predictor of expected performance for genetic programming
Leonardo Trujillo, Yuliana Martínez, Edgar Galván, Pierrick Legrand · 2012
An open question within Genetic Programming (GP) is how to characterize problemdifficulty. The goal is to develop predictive tools that estimate how difficult a problemis for GP to solve. Here we consider two groups of methods. We call the first group Evolvability Indicators (EI), measures that capture how amendable the fitness landscape is to a GP search. Examples of EIs are Fitness Distance Correlation (FDC) and Negative Slope Coefficient (NSC). The second group are Predictors of Expected Performance (PEP), models that take as input a set of descriptive attributes of a problem and predict the expected performance of GP. This paper compares an EI, the NSC, and a PEP model for a GP classifier. Results suggest that the EI does not correlate with the performance of the GP classifiers. Conversely, the PEP models show a high correlation with GP performance.