Xin Yao's Research Interests: Speciation and Niching

Speciation and niching have often been used in multi-objective optimisation. However, my interest in this area is mainly associated with my interest in automatic modularisation. I use speciation and niching to evolve different species and regard these species as specialist modules for an integrated system. Solving a complex problem using a monolithic system is often very hard. One way to get around it is to decompose the problem into smaller components first and then solve them. Speciation and niching can be used as a tool for such automatic decomposition. I am interested in different speciation and niching techniques that might be useful in this aspect.

I am also interested in theoretical analysis of fitness sharing. In particular, I am trying to analyse fitness sharing in terms of correlation between species.

Selected Papers

  1. V. Khare and X. Yao, ``Artificial speciation and automatic modularisation,'' Proc. of the 4th Asia-Pacific Conference on Simulated Evolution And Learning (SEAL'02), pp.56-60, Singapore, November 2002.

  2. V. Khare and X. Yao, ``Artificial Speciation of Neural Network Ensembles,'' Proc. of the 2002 UK Workshop on Computational Intelligence (UKCI'02), J. A. Bullinaria (ed.), Birmingham, UK, September 2002, pp.96-103.

  3. Y. Liu and X. Yao, ``Towards designing neural network ensembles by evolution,'' Proc. of the Fifth International Conference on Parallel Problem Solving from Nature (PPSN-V), Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Vol. 1498, A. E. Eiben, T. B{\"{a}}ck, M. Schoenauer and H.-P. Schwefel (ed.), Springer-Verlag, Berlin, pp.623-632, 1998.
    Available as liu_yao_ppsn98.ps.gz.

  4. P. J. Darwen and X. Yao, ``Speciation as automatic categorical modularization,'' IEEE Transactions on Evolutionary Computation, 1(2):101-108, 1997.
    Available as darwen_yao_tec.ps.gz.

  5. P. Darwen and X. Yao (1996b), ``Every niching method has its niche: fitness sharing and implicit sharing compared,'' Proc. of Parallel Problem Solving from Nature (PPSN) IV, Vol.1141, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Springer-Verlag, Berlin, pp.398-407, 1996.
    (Available as darwen_yao_compare.ps.Z).

  6. P. Darwen and X. Yao (1995a), ``A dilemma for fitness sharing with a scaling function,'' Proc. of 1995 IEEE Conference on Evolutionary Computation (ICEC'95), Perth, Australia, IEEE Press, pp.166-171.
    (Available as icec95.ps.Z).

Last update: 5 September 2000