Towards adaptive mutation in grammatical evolution
David S. Fagan, Erik Hemberg, Miguel Nicolau, Michael O’Neill, Seán McGarraghy · 2012
Adaptive mutation operations have been proposed in Evolutionary Computation (EC) many times and in different varieties, but few have gained widespread use. In nature, mutation rates vary over time, however it has become common practice to use static, widely accepted, values for mutation, particularly in GP-like systems. In this study, an adaptive mutation operation is presented and applied to Grammatical Evolution (GE) over a variety of benchmark problems. The results are examined and it is determined that the new operators could replace the need to specify mutation rates in GE on the problem domains examined.