Ebook: Genetic Programming Theory and Practice XIX

This book brings together some of the most impactful researchers in the field of Genetic Programming (GP), each one working on unique and interesting intersections of theoretical development and practical applications of this evolutionary-based Machine Learning paradigm. Topics of particular interest for this year´s book include powerful modeling techniques through GP-based symbolic regression, novel selection mechanisms that help guide the evolutionary process, modular approaches to GP, and applications in cybersecurity, biomedicine and program synthesis, as well as papers by practitioner of GP that focus on usability and real-world results. In summary, readers will get a glimpse of the current state of the art in GP research.

We present a GUI-driven and efficient Genetic Programming (GP) and AI Planning framework designed for agent-based learning research. Our framework, ABL-Unity3D, is built in Unity3D, a game development environment. ABL-Unity3D addresses challenges entailed in co-opting Unity3D: making the simulator serve agent learning rather than humans playing a game, lowering fitness evaluation time to make learning computationally feasible, and interfacing GP with an AI Planner to support hybrid algorithms. We achieve this by developing a Graphical User Interface (GUI) using the Unity3D editor’s programmable interface and performance optimizations. These optimizations result in at least a 3x speedup. In addition, we describe ABL-Unity3D by explaining how to use it for an example experiment using GP and AI Planning. We benchmark ABL-Unity3D by measuring the performance and speed of the AI Planner alone, GP alone, and the AI Planner with GP.

Increasing demand for human understanding of machine decision-making is deemed crucial for machine learning (ML) methodology development and further applications. It has inspired the emerging research field of interpretable and explainable ML/AI. Techniques have been developed to either provide additional explanations to a trained ML model or learn innately compact and understandable models. Genetic programming (GP), as a powerful learning instrument, holds great potential in interpretable and explainable learning. In this chapter, we first discuss concepts and popular methods in interpretable and explainable ML, and review research using GP for interpretability and explainability. We then introduce our previously proposed GP-based framework for interpretable and explainable learning applied to bioinformatics.