Improving genetic programming classification for binary and multiclass datasets

Genetic Programming (GP) is one of the evolutionary computation techniques that is used for the classification process. GP has shown that good accuracy values especially for binary classifications can be achieved, however, for multiclass classification unfortunately GP does not obtain high accuracy results. In this paper, we propose two approaches in order to improve the GP classification task. One approach (GP-K) uses the K-means clustering technique in order to transform the produced value of GP into class labels. The second approach (GP-D) uses a discretization technique to perform the transformation. A comparison of the original GP, GP-K and GP-D was conducted using binary and multiclass datasets. In addition, a comparison with other state-of-the-art classifiers was performed. The results reveal that GP-K shows good improvement in terms of accuracy compared to the original GP, however, it has a slightly longer execution time. GP-D also achieves higher accuracy values than the original GP as well as GP-K, and the comparison with the state-of-the-art classifiers reveal competitive accuracy values.