Land Cover/Land Use Multiclass Classification Using GP with Geometric Semantic Operators

Multiclass classification is a common requirement of many land cover/land use applications, one of the pillars of land science studies. Even though genetic programming has been applied with success to a large number of applications, it is not particularly suited for multiclass classification, thus limiting its use on such studies. In this paper we take a step forward towards filling this gap, investigating the performance of recently defined geometric semantic operators on two land cover/land use multiclass classification problems and also on a benchmark problem. Our results clearly indicate that genetic programming using the new geometric semantic operators outperforms standard genetic programming for all the studied problems, both on training and test data.