Evolutionary Computing based Analysis of Diversity in Grammatical Evolution

Diversity is a much sought after aspect of any evolutionary system. More diversity means a cornucopia of diverse behaviors and traits among the individuals of a population. Lack of diversity, on the other hand, leads to a stagnant population whose individuals are more or less similar to each other. Subsequently, they fail to produce a variety of offspring. Grammatical Evolution (GE), being an Evolutionary Algorithm (EA), is also an aspirant of diversity. It allows a GE system to maintain a dynamic population over multiple generations.In this paper, we present our reflections about diversity estimates in a (large) number of experiments. We performed evolutionary experiments to estimate a bunch of well-known benchmark polynomials. We also employed hybrid optimization in our experiments. Our results are insightful. In this paper, we also test the effect of hybrid optimization algorithms integrated with GE on the diversity of the population.