An Analysis of the Behaviour of Mutation in Grammatical Evolution

This study attempts to decompose the behaviour of mutation in Grammatical Evolution (GE). Standard GE mutation can be divided into two types of events, those that are structural in nature and those that are nodal. A structural event can alter the length of the phenotype whereas a nodal event simply alters the value at any terminal (leaf or internal node) of a derivation tree. We analyse the behaviour of standard mutation and compare it to the behaviour of its nodal and structural components. These results are then compared with standard GP operators to see how they differ. This study increases our understanding of how the search operators of an evolutionary algorithm behave.