The Effect of Multi-Generational Selection in Geometric Semantic Genetic Programming

Among the evolutionary methods, one that is quite prominent is genetic programming. In recent years, a variant called geometric semantic genetic programming (GSGP) was successfully applied to many real-world problems. Due to a peculiarity in its implementation, GSGP needs to store all its evolutionary history, i.e., all populations from the first one. We exploit this stored information to define a multi-generational selection scheme that is able to use individuals from older populations. We show that a limited ability to use “old” generations is actually useful for the search process, thus showing a zero-cost way of improving the performances of GSGP.