Integrating memetic search into the BioHEL evolutionary learning system for large-scale datasets

Local search methods are widely used to improve the performance of evolutionary computation algorithms in all kinds of domains. Employing advanced and efficient exploration mechanisms becomes crucial in complex and very large (in terms of search space) problems, such as when employing evolutionary algorithms to large-scale data mining tasks. Recently, the GAssist Pittsburgh evolutionary learning system was extended with memetic operators for discrete representations that use information from the supervised learning process to heuristically edit classification rules and rule sets. In this paper we first adapt some of these operators to BioHEL, a different evolutionary learning system applying the iterative learning approach, and afterwards propose versions of these operators designed for continuous attributes and for dealing with noise. The performance of all these operators and their combination is extensively evaluated on a broad range of synthetic large-scale datasets to identify the settings that present the best balance between efficiency and accuracy. Finally, the identified best configurations are compared with other classes of machine learning methods on both synthetic and real-world large-scale datasets and show very competent performance.