Scaling Evolutionary Programming with the Use of Apache Spark

Organizations across the globe gather more and more data, encouraged by easy-to-use and cheap cloud storage services. Large datasets require new approaches to analysis and processing, which include methods based on machine learning. In particular, symbolic regression can provide many useful insights. Unfortunately, due to high resource requirements, use of this method for large-scale dataset analysis might be unfeasible. In this paper, we analyze a bottleneck in the open-source implementation of this method we call hubert. We identify that the evaluation of individuals is the most costly operation. As a solution to this problem, we propose a new evaluation service based on the Apache Spark framework, which attempts to speed up computations by executing them in a distributed manner on a cluster of machines. We analyze the performance of the service by comparing the evaluation execution time of a number of samples with the use of both implementations. Finally, we draw conclusions and outline plans for further research.