Accurate High Performance Concrete Prediction with an Alignment-Based Genetic Programming System

In 2013, our research group published a contribution in which a new version of genetic programming, called Geometric Semantic Genetic Programming (GSGP), was fostered as an appropriate computational intelligence method for predicting the strength of high-performance concrete. That successful work, in which GSGP was shown to outperform the existing systems, allowed us to promote GSGP as the new state-of-the-art technology for high-performance concrete strength prediction. In this paper, we propose, for the first time, a novel genetic programming system called Nested Align Genetic Programming (NAGP). NAGP exploits semantic awareness in a completely different way compared to GSGP. The reported experimental results show that NAGP is able to significantly outperform GSGP for high-performance concrete strength prediction. More specifically, not only NAGP is able to obtain more accurate predictions than GSGP, but NAGP is also able to generate predictive models with a much smaller size, and thus easier to understand and interpret, than the ones generated by GSGP. Thanks to this ability of NAGP, we are able here to show the model evolved by NAGP, which was impossible for GSGP.

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