Authors:
Mohiul Islam
1
;
Nawwaf Kharma
1
and
Peter Grogono
2
Affiliations:
1
Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering, Concordia University, Montreal and Canada
;
2
Department of Computer Science & Software Engineering, Concordia University, Montreal and Canada
Keyword(s):
Evolutionary Computation, Computational Intelligence, Program Synthesis, Genetic Programming, Monte Carlo Simulation, Monte Carlo Tree Search, Symbolic Regression.
Abstract:
Expansion is a novel mutation operator for Genetic Programming (GP). It uses Monte Carlo simulation to repeatedly expand and evaluate programs using unit instructions, taking advantage of the granular search space of evolutionary program synthesis. Monte Carlo simulation and its heuristic search method, Monte Carlo Tree Search has been applied to Koza-style tree-based representation to compare results with different variation operations such as sub-tree crossover and point mutation. Using a set of benchmark symbolic regression problems, we prove that expansion have better fitness performance than point mutation, when included with crossover. It also provides significant boost in fitness when compared with GP using only crossover on a diverse problem set. We conclude that the best fitness can be achieved by including all three operators in GP, crossover, point mutation and expansion.