Programming with Annotated Grammar Estimation

Abstract

Evolutionary algorithms (EAs) mimic natural evolution to solve optimization problems. Because EAs do not require detailed assumptions, they can be applied to many real-world problems. In EAs, solution candidates are evolved using genetic operators such as crossover and mutation which are analogs to natural evolution. In recent years, EAs have been considered from the viewpoint of distribution estimation, with estimation of distribution algorithms (EDAs) attracting much attention ([14]). Although genetic operators in EAs are inspired by natural evolution, EAs can also be considered as algorithms that sample solution candidates from distributions of promising solutions. Since these distributions are generally unknown, approximation schemes are applied to perform the sampling. Genetic algorithms (GAs) and genetic programmings (GPs) approximate the sampling by randomly changing the promising solutions via genetic operators (mutation and crossover). In contrast, EDAs assume that the distributions of promising solutions can be expressed by parametric models, and they perform model learning and sampling from the learnt models repeatedly. Although GA-type sampling (mutation or crossover) is easy to perform, it has the disadvantage that GA-type sampling is valid only for the case where two structurally similar individuals have similar fitness values (e.g. the one-max problem). GA and GP have shown poor search performance in deceptive problems ([6]) where the condition above is not satisfied. However, EDAs have been reported to show much better search performance for some problems that GA and GP do not handle well. As in GAs, EDAs usually employ fixed length linear arrays to represent solution candidates (these EDAs are referred to as GA-EDAs in the present chapter). This decade, EDAs have been extended so as to handle programs and functions having tree structures (we refer to these as GP-EDAs in the present chapter). Since tree structures have different node number, the model learning is muchmore difficult than that of GA-EDAs. From the viewpoint of modeling types, GP-EDAs can be broadly classified into two groups: probabilistic proto-type tree (PPT) based methods and probabilistic context-free grammar (PCFG) based methods. PPT-based methods employ techniques devised in GA-EDAs by transforming variable length tree structures into fixed length linear arrays. PCFG-based methods employ