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Understanding Grammatical Evolution: Grammar Design

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Handbook of Grammatical Evolution

Abstract

A frequently overlooked consideration when using Grammatical Evolution (GE) is grammar design. This is because there is an infinite number of grammars that can specify the same syntax. There are, however, certain aspects of grammar design that greatly affect the speed of convergence and quality of solutions generated with GE. In this chapter, general guidelines for grammar design are presented. These are domain-independent, and can be used when applying GE to any problem. An extensive analysis of their effect and results across a large set of experiments are reported.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Technically, genotypes used with GE are length-bounded, in the sense that they cannot be smaller than zero, or larger than what the memory of the machine running the experiments can hold. This maximum size is, however, a technical limitation, rather than a conceptual bound.

  2. 2.

    The required number of 2500∕3 copies of each of the productions using the operators +, −, ∗ were rounded to 833, resulting in a negligible bias.

  3. 3.

    As the focus of this study is on grammar design, no regression performance improving techniques such as linear scaling [12] or cross-validation were used.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. College of Business, University College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland

    Miguel Nicolau

  2. School of Computer Science, University College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland

    Alexandros Agapitos

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  1. Miguel Nicolau
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  2. Alexandros Agapitos
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Correspondence to Miguel Nicolau .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science and Information Systems, University of Limerick, Castletroy, Limerick, Ireland

    Conor Ryan

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

    Michael O'Neill

  3. Department of Computer Science and Information Systems, University of Limerick, Castletroy, Limerick, Ireland

    JJ Collins

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Nicolau, M., Agapitos, A. (2018). Understanding Grammatical Evolution: Grammar Design. In: Ryan, C., O'Neill, M., Collins, J. (eds) Handbook of Grammatical Evolution. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-78717-6_2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-78717-6_2

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