A New Wave: A Dynamic Approach to Genetic Programming

Wave is a novel form of semantic genetic programming which operates by optimising the residual errors of a succession of short genetic programming runs, and then producing a cumulative solution. These short genetic programming runs are called periods, and they have heterogeneous parameters. In this paper we leverage the potential of Wave’s heterogeneity to simulate a dynamic evolutionary environment by incorporating self adaptive parameters together with an innovative approach to population renewal. We conduct an empirical study comparing this new approach with multiple linear regression (MLR) as well as several evolutionary computation (EC) methods including the well known geometric semantic genetic programming (GSGP) together with several other optimised Wave techniques. The results of our investigation show that the dynamic Wave algorithm delivers consistently equal or better performance than Standard GP (both with or without linear scaling), achieves testing fitness equal or better than multiple linear regression, and performs significantly better than GSGP on five of the six problems studied.