A hyper-heuristic approach to automated generation of mutation operators for evolutionary programming

Libin Hong, John H. Drake, John R. Woodward, Ender Özcan

Research output: Journal PublicationArticlepeer-review

34 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

Evolutionary programming can solve black-box function optimisation problems by evolving a population of numerical vectors. The variation component in the evolutionary process is supplied by a mutation operator, which is typically a Gaussian, Cauchy, or Lévy probability distribution. In this paper, we use genetic programming to automatically generate mutation operators for an evolutionary programming system, testing the proposed approach over a set of function classes, which represent a source of functions. The empirical results over a set of benchmark function classes illustrate that genetic programming can evolve mutation operators which generalise well from the training set to the test set on each function class. The proposed method is able to outperform existing human designed mutation operators with statistical significance in most cases, with competitive results observed for the rest.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)162-175
Number of pages14
JournalApplied Soft Computing Journal
Volume62
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - Jan 2018
Externally publishedYes

Keywords

  • Automatic design
  • Continuous optimisation
  • Evolutionary programming
  • Genetic programming
  • Hyper-heuristics

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Software

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