Adaptive Representations for Improving Evolvability, Parameter Control, and Parallelization of Gene Expression Programming

Gene Expression Programming (GEP) is a genetic algorithm that evolves linear chromosomes encoding nonlinear (tree-like) structures. In the original GEP algorithm, the genome size is problem specific and is determined through trial and error. In this work, a method for adaptive control of the genome size is presented. The approach introduces mutation, transposition, and recombination operators that enable a population of heterogeneously structured chromosomes, something the original GEP algorithm does not support. This permits crossbreeding between normally incompatible individuals, speciation within a population, increases the evolvability of the representations, and enhances parallel GEP. To test our approach, an assortment of problems were used, including symbolic regression, classification, and parameter optimization. Our experimental results show that our approach provides a solution for the problem of self-adaptive control of the genome size of GEP’s representation.