A new implementation of geometric semantic GP and its application to problems in pharmacokinetics

Moraglio et al. have recently introduced new genetic operators for genetic programming, called geometric semantic operators. These operators induce a unimodal fitness landscape for all the problems consisting in matching input data with known target outputs (like regression and classification). This feature facilitates genetic programming evolvability, which makes these operators extremely promising. Nevertheless, Moraglio et al. leave open problems, the most important one being the fact that these operators, by construction, always produce offspring that are larger than their parents, causing an exponential growth in the size of the individuals, which actually renders them useless in practice. In this paper we overcome this limitation by presenting a new efficient implementation of the geometric semantic operators. This allows us, for the first time, to use them on complex real-life applications, like the two problems in pharmacokinetics that we address here. Our results confirm the excellent evolvability of geometric semantic operators, demonstrated by the good results obtained on training data. Furthermore, we have also achieved a surprisingly good generalization ability, a fact that can be explained considering some properties of geometric semantic operators, which makes them even more appealing than before. © 2013 Springer-Verlag.