A statistical comparison of grammatical evolution strategies in the domain of human genetics

Detecting and characterizing genetic predictors of human disease susceptibility is an important goal in human genetics. New chip-based technologies are available that facilitate the measurement of thousands of DNA sequence variations across the human genome. Biologically-inspired stochastic search algorithms are expected to play an important role in the analysis of these high-dimensional datasets. We simulated datasets with up to 6000 attributes using two different genetic models and statistically compared the performance of grammatical evolution, grammatical swarm, and random search for building symbolic discriminant functions. We found no statistical difference among search algorithms within this specific domain.