An Efficient Structural Diversity Technique for Genetic Programming


Abstract

Genetic diversity plays an important role in avoiding premature convergence, which is a phenomenon that stifles the search effectiveness of evolutionary algorithms. However, approaches that avoid premature convergence by maintaining genetic diversity can do so at the cost of efficiency, requiring more fitness evaluations to find high quality solutions. We introduce a simple and efficient genetic diversity technique that is capable of avoiding premature convergence while maintaining a high level of search quality in tree-based genetic programming. Our method finds solutions to a set of benchmark problems in significantly fewer fitness evaluations than the algorithms that we compared against.