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Re:The quest to evolve neural networks through evolutionary ... by sevensor on Monday October 30, 2017 @09:36PM (#15590529)
Thanks for pointing this out. I had a look at http://www.evolvingai.org/files/1504.04909v1.pdf. It's an interesting read, although I'm not sold on the value of feature space exploration. I think it muddies the waters around the problem of balancing optimization with diversity, by lumping decisions and constraints together. What's to stop it from over-sampling regions of the decision space that have a steep gradient in the other features?
Re:The quest to evolve neural networks through evolutionary ... by zardo on Tuesday October 31, 2017 @01:29PM (#15594923)
What's to stop the discovered solutions from being similar? Nothing but the dimensions of interest. If the best solutions with respect to features a, b, and (a&b) are all the same, then it does not seek different solutions.

This may indicate you chose reduntant features though.

Here's an interesting application that provides some motivation. https://arxiv.org/abs/1407.3501

Re:The quest to evolve neural networks through evolutionary ... by sevensor on Tuesday October 31, 2017 @05:02PM (#15596543)
Regarding the similarity of solutions:

If, in a particular region, your model outputs are particularly sensitive to the inputs, that region can be overrepresented in a feature map. What I mean by this is that we cannot effectively choose between the solutions in this region -- the region is small compared to our ability to control inputs. Overrepresenting such a region in a population-based search starves the rest of the problem space of the algorithm's attention.

Thanks for the link, by the way -- this is a particularly interesting application.