Introduction Genetic programming is a domain-independent problem-solving approach in which computer programs are evolved to solve, or approximately solve, problems. Genetic programming is based on the Darwinian principle of reproduction and survival of the fittest and analogs of naturally occurring genetic operations such as crossover (sexual recombination) and mutation. John Holland's pioneering Adaptation in Natural and Artificial Systems (1975) described how an analog of the evolutionary process can be applied to solving mathematical problems and engineering optimization problems using what is now called the genetic algorithm (GA). The genetic algorithm attempts to find a good (or best) solution to the problem by genetically breeding a population of individuals over a series of generations. In the genetic algorithm, each individual in the population represents a candidate solut

Niching methods extend genetic algorithms to domains that require the location and maintenance of multiple solutions. Such domains include classification and machine learning, multimodal function optimization, multiobjective function optimization, and simulation of complex and adaptive systems. This study presents a comprehensive treatment of niching methods and the related topic of population diversity. Its purpose is to analyze existing niching methods and to design improved niching methods. To achieve this purpose, it first develops a general framework for the modelling of niching methods, and then applies this framework to construct models of individual niching methods, specifically crowding and sharing methods. Using a constructed model of crowding, this study determines why crowding methods over the last two decades have not made effective niching methods. A series of tests and design modifications results in the development of a highly effective form of crowding, called determin...

s: Jan. 1992 -- Dec. 1994 ffl CTI: Current Technology Index Jan./Feb. 1993 -- Jan./Feb. 1994 ffl DAI: Dissertation Abstracts International: Vol. 53 No. 1 -- Vol. 55 No. 4 (1994) ffl EEA: Electrical & Electronics Abstracts: Jan. 1991 -- Dec. 1994 ffl P: Index to Scientific & Technical Proceedings: Jan. 1986 -- Feb. 1995 (except Nov. 1994) ffl EI A: The Engineering Index Annual: 1987 -- 1992 ffl EI M: The Engineering Index Monthly: Jan. 1993 -- Dec. 1994 The following GA researchers have already kindly supplied their complete autobibliographies and/or proofread references to their papers: Dan Adler, Patrick Argos, Jarmo T. Alander, James E. Baker, Wolfgang Banzhaf, Ralf Bruns, I. L. Bukatova, Thomas Back, Yuval Davidor, Dipankar Dasgupta, Marco Dorigo, Bogdan Filipic, Terence C. Fogarty, David B. Fogel, Toshio Fukuda, Hugo de Garis, Robert C. Glen, David E. Goldberg, Martina Gorges-Schleuter, Jeffrey Horn, Aristides T. Hatjimihail, Mark J. Jakiela, Richard S. Judson, Akihiko Konaga...

Prediction in financial domains is notoriously difficult for a number of reasons. First, theories tend to be weak or non-existent, which makes problem formulation open ended by forcing us to consider a large number of independent variables and thereby increasing the dimensionality of the search space. Second, the weak relationships among variables tend to be nonlinear, and may hold only in limited areas of the search space. Third, in financial practice, where analysts conduct extensive manual analysis of historically well performing indicators, a key is to find the hidden interactions among variables that perform well in combination. Unfortunately, these are exactly the patterns that the greedy search biases incorporated by many standard rule learning algorithms will miss. In this paper, we describe and evaluate several variations of a new genetic learning algorithm (GLOWER) on a variety of data sets. The design of GLOWER has been motivated by financial prediction problems, but incorpo...

Investment involves the maximisation of return on one’s investment whilst minimising risk. Good forecasting, which often requires expert knowledge, can help to reduce risk. In this paper, we propose a genetic programming based system EDDIE, (which stands for Evolutionary Dynamic Data Investment Evaluator), as a forecasting tool. Genetic programming is inspired by evolution theory, and has been demonstrated to be successful in other areas. EDDIE interacts with the users and generates decision trees, which can also be seen as rule sets. We argue that EDDIE is suitable for forecasting because apart from utilising the power of genetic programming to efficiently search the space of decision trees, it allows expert knowledge to be channelled into forecasting and it generates rules which can easily be understood and verified. EDDIE has been applied to horse racing and achieved outstanding results. When experimented on 180 handicap races (real data) in the UK, it out-performed other common strategies used in horse race betting by great margins. The idea was then extended to financial forecasting. When tested on historical S&P-500 data EDDIE achieved a respectable annual rate of return over a three and a half year period. While luck may play a part in the success of EDDIE, our experimental results do indicate that EDDIE is a tool which deserves more research.

Automated methods of machine learning may prove to be useful in discovering biologically meaningful information hidden in the rapidly growing databases of DNA sequences and protein sequences. Genetic programming is an extension of the genetic algorithm in which a population of computer programs is bred, over a series of generations, in order to solve a problem. Genetic programming is capable of evolving complicated problem-solving expressions of unspecified size and shape. Moreover, when automatically defined functions are added to genetic programming, genetic programming becomes capable of efficiently capturing and exploiting recurring sub-patterns. This chapter describes how genetic programming with automatically defined functions successfully evolved motifs for detecting the D-E-A-D box family of proteins and for 1 detecting the manganese superoxide dismutase family. Both motifs were evolved without prespecifying their length. Both evolved motifs employed automatically defined functions to capture the repeated use of common subexpressions. When tested against the SWISS-PROT database of proteins, the two genetically evolved consensus motifs detect the two families either as well, or slightly better than, the comparable human-written motifs found in the PROSITE database. 1.

Abstract- Financial investment decision making is extremely difficult due to the complexity of the domain. Many factors could influence the change of share prices. FGP (Financial Genetic Programming) is a genetic programming based forecasting system, which is designed to help users evaluate impact of factors and explore their interactions in relation to future prices. Users channel into FGP factors that they believe are relevant to the prediction. Examples of such factors may include fundamental factors such as "price-earning ratio", "inflation rate " or/and technical factors such as "5-days moving average", "63-days trading range breakout", etc. FGP uses the power of genetic programming to generate decision trees through combination of technical rules with self-adjusted thresholds. In earlier papers, we have reported how FGP used well-known technical analysis rules to make investment decisions. This paper tests the versatility of FGP by testing it on shorter-term investment decisions. To evaluate FGP more thoroughly, we also compare it with C4.5, a well-known machine learning classifier system. We used six and a half years ’ daily closing price of the Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) index for training and over three and half years ’ data for testing and obtained favourable results for FGP. 1

EDDIE is a genetic programming based decision support tool for financial forecasting. EDDIE itself does not replace forecasting experts. It serves to improve the productivity of experts in searching the space of decision trees, with the aim to improve the odds in its user's favour. The efficacy of EDDIE has been reported in the literature. However, discovering patterns in historical data is only the first step towards building a practical financial forecasting tool. Data preparation, rules organization and application are all important issues. This paper describes an architecture that embeds EDDIE for learning from and monitoring the stock market.

Stock markets are very important in modern societies and their behaviour have serious implications in a wide spectrum of the world’s population. Investors, governing bodies and the society as a whole could benefit from better understanding of the behavior of stock markets. The traditional approach to analyze such systems is the use of analytical models. However, the complexity of financial markets represents a big challenge to the analytical approach. Most analytical models make simplifying assumptions, such as perfect rationality and homogeneous investors, which threaten the validity of analytical results. This motivates alternative methods. In this work, we developed an artificial financial market and used it to study the behavior of stock markets. In this market, we model technical, fundamental and noise traders. The technical traders are sophisticated genetic programming based agents that co-evolve (by means of their fitness function) by predicting investment opportunities in the market using technical analysis as the main tool. With this endogenous artificial market, we identified conditions under which the statistical properties of price series in the artificial market resembles those of the real financial markets. Additionally, we modeled the pressure to beat the market by a behavioral constraint imposed on the agents reflecting the Red Queen principle in evolution. We have demonstrated how evolutionary computation could play a key role in studying stock markets.

This study examines the potential of an evolutionary automatic programming methodology, Grammatical Evolution, to uncover a series of useful fuzzy technical trading rules for the ISEQ, the official equity index of the Irish Stock Exchange. Index values for the period 29/03/93 to 4/12/1997 are used to train and test the model. The preliminary findings indicate that the methodology has much potential. 1