Multi-objective multi-population Genetic Programming for feature selection and classification to high-dimensional data
Qiaoman Li, Xiaoying Gao, Wenyang Meng, Jianbin Ma · Proceedings of the Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference Companion · 2024
Classification for high-dimensional data is a challenging task due to a great number of redundant and irrelevant features. Genetic Programming (GP) has its built-in feature selection characteristics and is suitable for processing high-dimensional data. However, if the number of features in GP individual is not restricted, the bloat phenomenon will occur, which affects the generalization of the training model. Moreover, GP is easy to fall into local search in the evolutionary process. In this paper, a multi-objective multi-population GP classifier construction method is proposed, which uses a multipopulation co-evolution strategy to divide the evolving population into the main and auxiliary populations with different evolutionary strategies and different evaluation criteria, and employs a multiobjective strategy to ensure classification performance and restrict the number of features at the same time. Experiments on seven high-dimensional datasets show that our proposed multi-population co-evolution strategy and multi-objective strategy are all effective to improve the classification performance of GP classifiers. Comparisons with three state-of-the-art GP classifier construction methods show that our proposed methods achieve better or comparable classification performance on most cases.