Using Factorial Experiments to Evaluate the Effect of Genetic Programming Parameters

Statistical techniques for designing and analysing experiments are used to evalu- ate the individual and combined effects of genetic programming parameters. Three binary classification problems are investigated in a total of seven experiments consisting of 1108 runs of a machine code genetic programming system. The parameters having the largest effect in these experiments are the population size and the number of generations. A large number of parameters have negligible effects. The experiments indicate that the investigated genetic pro- gramming system is robust to parameter variations, with the exception of a few important pa- rameters.