An investigation on the roles of insertion and deletion operators in tree adjoining grammar guided genetic programming

We investigate the roles of insertion and deletion as mutation operators and local search operators in a tree adjoining grammar guided genetic programming (TAG3P) system (Nguyen Xuan Hoai et al., 2003). The results show that, on three standard problems, these operators work better as mutation operators than the more standard sub-tree mutation originally used in (Nguyen Xuan Hoai et al., 2003, 2004). Moreover, for some problems, insertion and deletion can act effectively as local search operators, allowing TAG3P to solve problems with very small population sizes.