Zoetrope Genetic Programming for Regression
This addresses the problem of efficient and accurate symbolic regression for researchers and practitioners, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing genetic programming methods.
The paper tackles symbolic regression by introducing Zoetrope Genetic Programming (ZGP), which uses a novel representation to evolve mathematical expressions, achieving state-of-the-art performance and low computational time on public datasets.
The Zoetrope Genetic Programming (ZGP) algorithm is based on an original representation for mathematical expressions, targeting evolutionary symbolic regression.The zoetropic representation uses repeated fusion operations between partial expressions, starting from the terminal set. Repeated fusions within an individual gradually generate more complex expressions, ending up in what can be viewed as new features. These features are then linearly combined to best fit the training data. ZGP individuals then undergo specific crossover and mutation operators, and selection takes place between parents and offspring. ZGP is validated using a large number of public domain regression datasets, and compared to other symbolic regression algorithms, as well as to traditional machine learning algorithms. ZGP reaches state-of-the-art performance with respect to both types of algorithms, and demonstrates a low computational time compared to other symbolic regression approaches.