Control of Bloat in Genetic Programming by Means of the Island Model

Abstract

This paper presents a new proposal for reducing bloat in Genetic Programming. This proposal is based in a well-known parallel evolutionary model: the island model. We firstly describe the theoretical motivation for this new approach to the bloat problem, and then we present a set of experiments that gives us evidence of the findings extracted from the theory. The experiments have been performed on a representative problem extracted from the GP field: the even parity 5 problem. We analyse the evolution of bloat employing different settings for the parameters employed. The conclusion is that the Island Model helps to prevent the bloat phenomenon.