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Better GP benchmarks: community survey results and proposals

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Abstract

We present the results of a community survey regarding genetic programming benchmark practices. Analysis shows broad consensus that improvement is needed in problem selection and experimental rigor. While views expressed in the survey dissuade us from proposing a large-scale benchmark suite, we find community support for creating a “blacklist” of problems which are in common use but have important flaws, and whose use should therefore be discouraged. We propose a set of possible replacement problems.

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Notes

  1. http://gpbenchmarks.org/

  2. http://gpbenchmarks.org/gecco-2012-discussion/

  3. http://gpbenchmarks.org/publications/

  4. http://sciencecodemanifesto.org

  5. http://cs.gmu.edu/~eclab/projects/ecj/

  6. http://casnew.iti.upv.es/index.php/evocompetitions/105-symregcompetition

  7. http://www.symbolicregression.com/

  8. http://www.infobiotics.org/gpchallenge

  9. http://archive.ics.uci.edu/ml/

  10. http://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~ml/weka/

  11. http://icos.cs.nott.ac.uk/datasets/psp_benchmark.html

  12. http://www.sigkdd.org/kddcup/

  13. http://www.kaggle.com/

  14. http://www.nipsfsc.ecs.soton.ac.uk/datasets/

  15. http://www.netflixprize.com/

  16. http://torcs.sourceforge.net/

  17. http://www.marioai.org/

  18. http://www.ptsp-game.net/

  19. http://www.pacman-vs-ghosts.net/

  20. http://aichallenge.org/

  21. http://robocode.sourceforge.net/

  22. http://www.battlecode.org/

  23. https://groups.google.com/d/msg/the-ptsp-competition/TvtWhELr-z4/ACYCrNMVxToJ

  24. http://www.aigameresearch.org/

  25. http://code.google.com/codejam/contests.html

  26. http://www.spoj.pl/

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Acknowledgments

Thanks to Ricardo Segurado and the University College Dublin CSTAR statistics consultancy; thanks to Marilyn McGee-Lennon in the School of Computing Science at the University of Glasgow for her advice on survey design, and to the School itself for providing the supporting web service. Thanks to all those who participated in the GP survey and have engaged in discussion through the GP mailing list, the benchmark mailing list, and the GECCO 2012 debate. Thanks to the anonymous reviewers of this paper. David R White is funded by the Scottish Informatics and Computer Science Alliance. James McDermott is funded by the Irish Research Council. Gabriel Kronberger is supported by the Austrian Research Promotion Agency, Josef Ressel-centre “Heureka!” Wojciech Jaśkowski is supported by Polish Ministry of Science and Education, grant no. 91-531/DS.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Computing Science, University of Glasgow, Glasgow, UK

    David R. White

  2. School of Business, University College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland

    James McDermott

  3. Instituto Superior de Estatística e Gestão de Informação (ISEGI), Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Lisbon, Portugal

    Mauro Castelli

  4. Dipartimento di Informatica, Sistemistica e Comunicazione, University of Milano-Bicocca, Milan, Italy

    Luca Manzoni

  5. BEACON Center for the Study of Evolution in Action, Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI, USA

    Brian W. Goldman

  6. University of Applied Sciences Upper Austria, Linz, Austria

    Gabriel Kronberger

  7. Institute of Computing Science, Poznan University of Technology, Poznan, Poland

    Wojciech Jaśkowski

  8. CSAIL, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA

    Una-May O’Reilly

  9. Department of Computer Science, George Mason University, Fairfax, VA, USA

    Sean Luke

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Correspondence to James McDermott.

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White, D.R., McDermott, J., Castelli, M. et al. Better GP benchmarks: community survey results and proposals. Genet Program Evolvable Mach 14, 3–29 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10710-012-9177-2

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