Accelerating Convergence in Cartesian Genetic Programming by Using a New Genetic Operator

Genetic programming algorithms seek to find interpretable and good solutions for problems which are difficult to solve analytically. For example, we plan to use this paradigm to develop a car accident severity prediction model for new occupant safety functions. This complex problem will suffer from the major disadvantage of genetic programming, which is its high demand for computational effort to find good solutions. A main reason for this demand is a low rate of convergence. In this paper, we introduce a new genetic operator called forking to accelerate the rate of convergence. Our idea is to interpret individuals dynamically as centers of local Gaussian distributions and allow a sampling process in these distributions when populations get too homogeneous. We demonstrate this operator by extending the Cartesian Genetic Programming algorithm and show that on our examples convergence is accelerated by over 50% on average. We finish this paper with giving hints about parameterization of the forking operator for other problems.