A novel binary classification approach based on geometric semantic genetic programming

Abstract

Geometric semantic genetic programming (GSGP) is a recent variant of genetic programming. GSGP allows the landscape of any supervised regression problem to be transformed into a unimodal error surface, thus it has been applied only to this kind of problem. In a previous paper, we presented a novel variant of GSGP for binary classification problems that, taking inspiration from perceptron neural networks, uses a logistic-based activation function to constrain the output value of a GSGP tree in the interval [0,1]. This simple approach allowed us to use the standard RMSE function to evaluate the train classification error on binary classification problems and, consequently, to preserve the intrinsic properties of the geometric semantic operators. The results encouraged us to investigate this approach further. To this aim, in this paper, we present the results from 18 test problems, which we compared with those achieved by eleven well-known and widely classification schemes. We also studied how the parameter settings affect the classification performance and the use of the F-score function to deal with imbalanced data. The results confirmed the effectiveness of the proposed approach.