Numeric Mutation: Improved Search in Genetic Programming

May 1998

Proceedings of the Eleventh International Florida Artificial Intelligence Research Society Conference (FLAIRS 1998)

Volume

Proceedings of the Eleventh International Florida Artificial Intelligence Research Society Conference (FLAIRS 1998)

All Papers

Genetic programming is relatively poor at discovering useful numeric constants for the terminal nodes of its s-expression trees. In this paper we outline an adaptation to genetic programming, called numeric mutation. We provide empirical evidence and analysis that demonstrate that numeric mutation makes a statistically significant increase in genetic programming’s performance for symbolic regression problems.