Genetic programming for evolving programs with loop structures for classification tasks

Object recognition and classification are important tasks in robotics. Genetic Programming (GP) is a powerful technique that has been successfully used to automatically generate (evolve) classifiers. The effectiveness of GP is limited by the expressiveness of the functions used to evolve programs. It is believed that loop structures can considerably improve the quality of GP programs in terms of both performance and interpretability. This paper proposes five new loop structures using which GP can evolve compact programs that can perform sophisticated processing. The use of loop structures in GP is evaluated against GP with no loops for both image and non-image classification tasks. Evolved programs using the proposed loop structures are analysed in several problems. The results show that loop structures can increase classification accuracy compared to GP with no loops.