Specialization and elitism in lexicase and tournament selection

Edward Pantridge, Nicholas Freitag McPhee, Thomas Helmuth, Lee Spector

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

6 Scopus citations

Abstract

Prior work has demonstrated that genetic programming systems often maintain higher levels of population diversity when using lexicase selection than when using other parent selection methods, and that the use of lexicase selection improves problem-solving performance in many circumstances. It has been suggested that it is not only the maintenance of diversity that is responsible for the performance of lexicase selection, but more specifically the production and maintenance of “specialists” that matters, where specialists are defined to be individuals with the lowest error, relative to the rest of the population, on a small number of training cases regardless of total error. Here we provide results of experiments that uphold this suggestion by tracking the numbers of specialists selected by lexicase selection and by tournament selection in a genetic programming system solving software synthesis problems. Our results also show that lexicase selection selects parents with poor total error far more frequently than tournament selection, even near the ends of successful runs, suggesting that such selections are integral to the improved problem-solving performance of lexicase selection.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationGECCO 2018 Companion - Proceedings of the 2018 Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference Companion
PublisherAssociation for Computing Machinery, Inc
Pages1914-1917
Number of pages4
ISBN (Electronic)9781450357647
DOIs
StatePublished - Jul 6 2018
Event2018 Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference, GECCO 2018 - Kyoto, Japan
Duration: Jul 15 2018Jul 19 2018

Publication series

NameGECCO 2018 Companion - Proceedings of the 2018 Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference Companion

Other

Other2018 Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference, GECCO 2018
Country/TerritoryJapan
CityKyoto
Period7/15/187/19/18

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© 2018 Association for Computing Machinery.

Keywords

  • Genetic programming
  • Lexicase selection
  • Program synthesis
  • Tournament selection

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