English

Lamarckian Evolution and the Baldwin Effect in Evolutionary Neural Networks

Neural and Evolutionary Computing 2007-05-23 v1

Abstract

Hybrid neuro-evolutionary algorithms may be inspired on Darwinian or Lamarckian evolu- tion. In the case of Darwinian evolution, the Baldwin effect, that is, the progressive incorporation of learned characteristics to the genotypes, can be observed and leveraged to improve the search. The purpose of this paper is to carry out an exper- imental study into how learning can improve G-Prop genetic search. Two ways of combining learning and genetic search are explored: one exploits the Baldwin effect, while the other uses a Lamarckian strategy. Our experiments show that using a Lamarckian op- erator makes the algorithm find networks with a low error rate, and the smallest size, while using the Bald- win effect obtains MLPs with the smallest error rate, and a larger size, taking longer to reach a solution. Both approaches obtain a lower average error than other BP-based algorithms like RPROP, other evolu- tionary methods and fuzzy logic based methods

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.cs/0603004,
  title  = {Lamarckian Evolution and the Baldwin Effect in Evolutionary Neural Networks},
  author = {P. A. Castillo and M. G. Arenas and J. G. Castellano and J. J. Merelo and A. Prieto and V. Rivas and G. Romero},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:cs/0603004},
  year   = {2007}
}

Comments

Presented in a Spanish conference, MAEB

R2 v1 2026-07-22T12:25:14.234Z