Niching genetic network programming with rule accumulation for decision making: An evolutionary rule-based approach

As one of the most important research branches of evolutionary computation (EC), learning classifier system (LCS) is dedicated to discover decision making classifiers (“IF-THEN” type rules) via evolution and learning. Recent advances in LCS have shown distinguished generalization property over traditional approaches. In this paper, a novel LCS named niching genetic network programming with rule accumulation (nGNP-RA) is proposed. The unique features of the proposal arise from the following three points: First, it utilizes an advanced graph-based EC named GNP as the rule generator, resulting higher knowledge representation ability than traditional genetic algorithm (GA)-based LCSs; Second, a novel niching mechanism is developed in GNP to encourage the discovery of high-quality diverse rules; Third, a novel reinforcement learning (RL)-based mechanism is embedded to assign accurate credits to the discovered rules. To verify the effectiveness and robustness of nGNP-RA over traditional systems, two decision making testbeds are applied, including the benchmark tileworld problem and the real mobile robot control application.