Is increased diversity in genetic programming beneficial? An analysis of lineage selection

This paper presents an analysis of increased diversity in genetic programming. A selection strategy based on genetic lineages is used to increase genetic diversity. A genetic lineage is defined as the path from an individual to individuals which were created from its genetic material. The method is applied to three problem domains: artificial ant, even-5-parity and symbolic regression of the binomial-3 function. We examine how increased diversity affects problems differently and draw conclusions about the types of diversity which are more important for each problem. Results indicate that diversity in the ant problem helps to overcome deception, while elitism in combination with diversity is likely to benefit the parity and regression problems.