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An Empirical Study of Functional Complexity as an Indicator of Overfitting in Genetic Programming

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNTCS,volume 6621))

Abstract

Recently, it has been stated that the complexity of a solution is a good indicator of the amount of overfitting it incurs. However, measuring the complexity of a program, in Genetic Programming, is not a trivial task. In this paper, we study the functional complexity and how it relates with overfitting on symbolic regression problems. We consider two measures of complexity, Slope-based Functional Complexity, inspired by the concept of curvature, and Regularity-based Functional Complexity based on the concept of Hölderian regularity. In general, both complexity measures appear to be poor indicators of program overfitting. However, results suggest that Regularity-based Functional Complexity could provide a good indication of overfitting in extreme cases.

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Trujillo, L., Silva, S., Legrand, P., Vanneschi, L. (2011). An Empirical Study of Functional Complexity as an Indicator of Overfitting in Genetic Programming. In: Silva, S., Foster, J.A., Nicolau, M., Machado, P., Giacobini, M. (eds) Genetic Programming. EuroGP 2011. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 6621. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-20407-4_23

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-20407-4_23

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-20406-7

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-20407-4

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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