Conventional Genetic Network Programming Research Articles

A novel evolutionary method to search interesting association rules by keywords

In this paper, we propose an evolutionary method for directly mining interesting association rules. Most of the association rule mining methods give a large number of rules, and it is difficult for human beings to deal with them. We study this problem by borrowing the style of search engine, that is, searching association rules by keywords. Whether a rule is interesting or not is decided by its relation to the keywords, and we introduce both semantic and statistical methods to measure such relation. The mining process is built on an evolutionary approach, Genetic Network Programming (GNP). Different from the conventional GNP based association rule mining method, the proposed method pays more attention to generate the GNP individuals carefully, which will mine interesting association rules efficiently. After the rules are generated, they will be ranked and annotated by meaningful information, such as similar rules and representative transactions, in order to help the user to understand the rules better. We also discuss how to mine generalized interesting association rules, describing more abstract level of information than the common association rules. In the simulation section, we give some demonstrations of the proposed method using a census data set, which shows a promising way to find the interesting association rules.

Genetic Network Programming with Estimation of Distribution Algorithms for Class Association Rule Mining in Traffic Prediction

Genetic Network Programming (GNP) is one of the evolutionary optimization algorithms, which uses directed-graph structures to represent its solutions. It has been clarified that GNP works well to find class association rules in traffic prediction systems. In this paper, a novel evolutionary paradigm named GNP with Estimation of Distribution Algorithms (GNP-EDAs) is proposed and used to find important class association rules in traffic prediction systems. In GNP-EDAs, a probabilistic model replaces crossover and mutation to enhance the evolution. The new population of individuals is produced from the probabilistic distribution estimated from the selected elite individuals of the previous generation. The probabilistic information on the connections and transitions of GNP-EDAs is extracted from its population to construct the probabilistic model. In this paper, two methods are described to build the probabilistic model for producing the offspring. In addition, a classification mechanism is introduced to estimate the traffic prediction based on the extracted class association rules. We compared GNPEDAs with the conventional GNP and the simulation results showed that GNP-EDAs can extract the class association rules more effectively, when the number of the candidate class association rules increase. And the classification accuracy of the proposed method shows good results in traffic prediction systems.

Combination of Two Evolutionary Methods for Mining Association Rules in Large and Dense Databases

Among several methods of extracting association rules that have been reported, a new evolutionary method named Genetic Network Programming (GNP) has also shown its effectiveness for small databases in the sense that they have a relatively small number of attributes. However, this conventional GNP method is not be able to deal with large databases with a huge number of attributes, because its search space becomes very large, causing bad performance at running time. The aim of this paper is to propose a new method to extract association rules from large and dense databases with a huge amount of attributes through the combination of conventional GNP based mining method and a specially designed genetic algorithm (GA). Each of these evolutionary methods works in its own processing level and they are highly synchronized to act as one system.Our strategy consists in the division of a large and dense database into many small databases. These small databases are considered as individuals and form a population. Then the conventional GNP based mining method is applied to extract association rules for each of these individuals. Finally, the population is evolved through several generations using GA with special genetic operators considering the acquired information. Two complementary processing levels are defined: Global Level and Local Level, each with its own independent tasks and processes. In the Global Level mainly GA process is carried out, whereas in the Local Level, conventional GNP based mining method is carried out in parallel and they generate their own local pools of association rules. Several special genetic operations for GA in the Global Level are proposed and the performance of each of them and their combination is shown and compared.In our simulations, the conventional GNP based mining method and our proposed method are compared using a real world large and dense database with a huge amount of attributes. The results show that extending the conventional GNP based mining method using GA allows to extract association rules from large and dense databases directly and more efficiently than the conventional GNP method.

Genetic Network Programming with Rule Accumulation and its Application to Tile-World Problem

Genetic Network Programming (GNP) is an evolutionary algorithm derived from GA and GP. Directed graph structure, reusability of nodes, and implicit memory function enable GNP to deal with complex problems in dynamic environments efficiently and effectively, as many paper demonstrated. This paper proposed a new method to optimize GNP by extracting and using rules. The basic idea of GNP with Rule Accumulation (GNP with RA) is to extract rules with higher fitness values from the elite individuals and store them in the pool every generation. A rule is defined as a sequence of successive judgment results and a processing node, which represent the good experiences of the past behavior. As a result, the rule pool serves as an experience set of GNP obtained in the evolutionary process. By extracting the rules during the evolutionary period and then matching them with the situations of the environment, we could, for example, guide agents' behavior properly and get better performance of the agents. In this paper, we apply GNP with RA to the problem of determining agents' behaviors in the Tile-world environment in order to evaluate its effectiveness. The simulation results demonstrate that GNP with RA could have better performances than the conventional GNP both in the average fitness value and its stability.

Genetic Network Programming with Rules

Genetic Network Programming (GNP) is an evolutionary approach which can evolve itself and find the optimal solutions. It is based on the idea of Genetic Algorithm and uses the data structure of directed graphs. Many papers have demonstrated that GNP can deal with complex problems in the dynamic environments very efficiently and effectively. As a result, recently, GNP is getting more and more attentions and is being used in many different areas such as data mining, extracting trading rules of stock markets, elevator systems, etc and GNP has obtained some outstanding results. In order to improve GNP's performance further, this paper proposes a new method called GNP with Rules. The aim of the proposed method is to balance exploitation and exploration of GNP, that is, to strengthen exploitation ability by using the exploited information extensively during the evolution process of GNP. The proposed method consists of 4 steps: rule extraction, rule selection, individual reconstruction and individual replacement. These 4 steps are added to the conventional algorithm of GNP. In order to measure the performance of the proposed method, the tileworld was used as the simulation environment. The simulation results show some advantages of GNP with Rules over conventional GNPs.

Comparative Association Rules Mining Using Genetic Network Programming (GNP) with Attributes Accumulation Mechanism and its Application to Traffic Systems

Among several methods of extracting association rules that have been reported, a new evolutionary method named Genetic Network Programming (GNP) has also shown its effectiveness for dense databases. However, the conventional GNP data mining method can not find comparative relations and hidden patterns among a large amount of data. In this paper, we present a method of comparative association rules mining using Genetic Network Programming (GNP) with attributes accumulation mechanism in order to uncover comparative association rules between different datasets. GNP is an evolutionary approach recently developed, which can evolve itself and find the optimal solutions. The objective of the comparative association rules mining is to check two or more databases instead of one, so as to find the hidden relations among them. The proposed method measures the importance of association rules by using the absolute values of the confidence differences of the rules obtained from different databases and can get a number of interesting rules. Association rules obtained by comparison can help us to find and analyze the explicit and implicit patterns among a large amount of data. On the other hand, the calculation is very time-consuming, when the conventional GNP based data mining is used for the large attributes case. So, we have proposed an attributes accumulation mechanism to improve the performances. Then, the comparative association rules mining using GNP has been applied to a complicated traffic system. By mining and analyzing the rules under different traffic situations, it was found that we can get interesting information of the traffic system.

Genetic Network Programming with Automatically Generated Macro Nodes of Variable Size

Recently, Genetic Network Programming (GNP) has been proposed as one of the evolutionary algorithms. It represents its solutions as directed graph structures and the distinguished abilities have been shown. However, when we apply GNP to complex problems like the real world one, GNP must have robustness against the changes of environments and evolve quickly. Therefore, we introduced Automatically Generated Macro Nodes (AGMs) to GNP (GNP with AGMs). Actually GNP with AGMs has shown higher performances than the conventional GNP in terms of the fitness and the speed of evolution. In this paper, a new mechanism, AGMs with variable size, is introduced to GNP. Conventional AGMs have the fixed number of nodes and they evolve using only genetic operations, while a new method allows AGM to add nodes by necessity and delete nodes which do not contribute to the evolution of the AGM. The proposed GNP with AGMs of variable size is expected to evolve effectively and efficiently when it is applied to agent systems and also expected to make better behavior sequences of agents more easily than the conventional GNP algorithm. In the simulations, the proposed and conventional methods are applied to a tileworld problem and they are compared with each other. From the results, GNP with AGMs of variable size shows better fitness than GNP with AGMs of fixed size and the conventional GNP when adapting ten different environments.

Genetic Network Programming for Automatic Program Generation

In this paper, a recently proposed Evolutionary Computation method called Genetic Network Programming (GNP) is applied to generate programs such as Boolean functions. GNP is an extension of Genetic Algorithm (GA) and Genetic Programming (GP). It has a directed graph structure as gene and can search for solutions effectively. GNP has been mainly applied to dynamic problems and has shown better performances compared to GP. However, its application to static problems has not yet been studied well. Thus in this paper, GNP is applied to generate programs as its extension to solving static problems. In order to apply GNP to generating static problems, we introduced a new element, memory. In the proposed method, a GNP individual consists of a directed graph and a memory, while one in conventional GNP consists only of a directed graph. In the simulations, GNP succeeded in solving Even-n-Parity problem and Mirror Symmetry problem.

Genetic Network Programming with Automatically Generated Macro Nodes

Genetic Network Programming (GNP) extended from other evolutionary computations such as Genetic Algorithm (GA) and Genetic Programming (GP) has network structures as gene. Previously, the program size of conventional GNP was fixed and GNP programs have not introduced the concept of sub-routines, although GA and GP paid attention to sub-routines. In this paper, a new method where GNP with Automatically Generated Macro Nodes (GNP with AGMs) composed of a number of nodes is proposed for improving the performance of GNP. These AGMs also have network structures and are evolved like main GNP. In addition to that, AGMs have multiple inputs and outputs that have not been introduced in the past. In the simulations, comparisons between GNP program only and GNP with AGMs are carried out using the tile world. Simulation results shows that the proposed method brings better results compared with traditional GNP. And it is clarified from simulations that the node transition rules obtained by AGMs show the generalized rules able to deal with unknown environments.