Evolutionary Constructive Induction

Feature construction in classification is a preprocessing step in which one or more new attributes are constructed from the original attribute set, the object being to construct features that are more predictive than the original feature set. Genetic programming allows the construction of nonlinear combinations of the original features. We present a comprehensive analysis of genetic programming (GP) used for feature construction, in which four different fitness functions are used by the GP and four different classification techniques are subsequently used to build the classifier. Comparisons are made of the error rates and the size and complexity of the resulting trees. We also compare the overall performance of GP in feature construction with that of GP used directly to evolve a decision tree classifier, with the former proving to be a more effective use of the evolutionary paradigm.