These contributions, written by the foremost international researchers and practitioners of Genetic Programming (GP), explore the synergy between theoretical and empirical results on real-world problems, producing a comprehensive view of the state of the art in GP.  In this year’s edition, the topics covered include many of the most important issues and research questions in the field, such as: opportune application domains for GP-based methods, game playing and co-evolutionary search, symbolic regression and efficient learning strategies, encodings and representations for GP, schema theorems, and new selection mechanisms.The volume includes several chapters on best practices and lessons learned from hands-on experience. Readers will discover large-scale, real-world applications of GP to a variety of problem domains via in-depth presentations of the latest and most significant results.

This volume comprises a selection of works presented at the Numerical and Evolutionary Optimization (NEO) workshop held in September 2015 in Tijuana, Mexico. The development of powerful search and optimization techniques is of great importance in today’s world that requires researchers and practitioners to tackle a growing number of challenging real-world problems. In particular, there are two well-established and widely known fields that are commonly applied in this area: (i) traditional numerical optimization techniques and (ii) comparatively recent bio-inspired heuristics. Both paradigms have their unique strengths and weaknesses, allowing them to solve some challenging problems while still failing in others.

The goal of the NEO workshop series is to bring together people from these and related fields to discuss, compare and merge their complimentary perspectives in order to develop fast and reliable hybrid methods that maximize the strengths and minimize the weaknesses of the underlying paradigms. Through this effort, we believe that the NEO can promote the development of new techniques that are applicable to a broader class of problems. Moreover, NEO fosters the understanding and adequate treatment of real-world problems particularly in emerging fields that affect us all such as health care, smart cities, big data, among many others. The extended papers the NEO 2015 that comprise this book make a contribution to this goal.

This volume comprises a selection of works presented at the Numerical and Evolutionary Optimization (NEO 2016) workshop held in September 2016 in Tlalnepantla, Mexico. The development of powerful search and optimization techniques is of great importance in today’s world and requires researchers and practitioners to tackle a growing number of challenging real-world problems. In particular, there are two well-established and widely known fields that are commonly applied in this area: (i) traditional numerical optimization techniques and (ii) comparatively recent bio-inspired heuristics. Both paradigms have their unique strengths and weaknesses, allowing them to solve some challenging problems while still failing in others.

The goal of the NEO workshop series is to bring together experts from these and related fields to discuss, compare and merge their complementary perspectives in order to develop fast and reliable hybrid methods that maximize the strengths and minimize the weaknesses of the underlying paradigms. In doing so, NEO promotes the development of new techniques that are applicable to a broader class of problems. Moreover, NEO fosters the understanding and adequate treatment of real-world problems particularly in emerging fields that affect all of us, such as healthcare, smart cities, big data, among many others. The extended papers presented in the book contribute to achieving this goal.  

This volume comprises a selection of works presented at the Numerical and Evolutionary Optimization (NEO) workshop held in September 2015 in Tijuana, Mexico. The development of powerful search and optimization techniques is of great importance in today's world that requires researchers and practitioners to tackle a growing number of challenging real-world problems. In particular, there are two well-established and widely known fields that are commonly applied in this area: (i) traditional numerical optimization techniques and (ii) comparatively recent bio-inspired heuristics. Both paradigms have their unique strengths and weaknesses, allowing them to solve some challenging problems while still failing in others.

The goal of the NEO workshop series is to bring together people from these and related fields to discuss, compare and merge their complimentary perspectives in order to develop fast and reliable hybrid methods that maximize the strengths and minimize the weaknesses of the underlying paradigms. Through this effort, we believe that the NEO can promote the development of new techniques that are applicable to a broader class of problems. Moreover, NEO fosters the understanding and adequate treatment of real-world problems particularly in emerging fields that affect us all such as health care, smart cities, big data, among many others. The extended papers the NEO 2015 that comprise this book make a contribution to this goal.

Genetic Programming Theory and Practice brings together some of the most impactful researchers in the field of Genetic Programming (GP), each one working on unique and interesting intersections of theoretical development and practical applications of this evolutionary-based machine learning paradigm. Topics of particular interest for this year’s book include powerful modeling techniques through GP-based symbolic regression, novel selection mechanisms that help guide the evolutionary process, modular approaches to GP, and applications in cybersecurity, biomedicine, and program synthesis, as well as papers by practitioner of GP that focus on usability and real-world results. In summary, readers will get a glimpse of the current state of the- art in GP research.

These contributions, written by the foremost international researchers and practitioners of Genetic Programming (GP), explore the synergy between theoretical and empirical results on real-world problems, producing a comprehensive view of the state of the art in GP.  In this year’s edition, the topics covered include many of the most important issues and research questions in the field, such as: opportune application domains for GP-based methods, game playing and co-evolutionary search, symbolic regression and efficient learning strategies, encodings and representations for GP, schema theorems, and new selection mechanisms.The volume includes several chapters on best practices and lessons learned from hands-on experience. Readers will discover large-scale, real-world applications of GP to a variety of problem domains via in-depth presentations of the latest and most significant results.

This volume comprises a selection of works presented at the Numerical and Evolutionary Optimization (NEO) workshop held in September 2015 in Tijuana, Mexico. The development of powerful search and optimization techniques is of great importance in today’s world that requires researchers and practitioners to tackle a growing number of challenging real-world problems. In particular, there are two well-established and widely known fields that are commonly applied in this area: (i) traditional numerical optimization techniques and (ii) comparatively recent bio-inspired heuristics. Both paradigms have their unique strengths and weaknesses, allowing them to solve some challenging problems while still failing in others.

The goal of the NEO workshop series is to bring together people from these and related fields to discuss, compare and merge their complimentary perspectives in order to develop fast and reliable hybrid methods that maximize the strengths and minimize the weaknesses of the underlying paradigms. Through this effort, we believe that the NEO can promote the development of new techniques that are applicable to a broader class of problems. Moreover, NEO fosters the understanding and adequate treatment of real-world problems particularly in emerging fields that affect us all such as health care, smart cities, big data, among many others. The extended papers the NEO 2015 that comprise this book make a contribution to this goal.

This volume comprises a selection of works presented at the Numerical and Evolutionary Optimization (NEO 2016) workshop held in September 2016 in Tlalnepantla, Mexico. The development of powerful search and optimization techniques is of great importance in today’s world and requires researchers and practitioners to tackle a growing number of challenging real-world problems. In particular, there are two well-established and widely known fields that are commonly applied in this area: (i) traditional numerical optimization techniques and (ii) comparatively recent bio-inspired heuristics. Both paradigms have their unique strengths and weaknesses, allowing them to solve some challenging problems while still failing in others.

The goal of the NEO workshop series is to bring together experts from these and related fields to discuss, compare and merge their complementary perspectives in order to develop fast and reliable hybrid methods that maximize the strengths and minimize the weaknesses of the underlying paradigms. In doing so, NEO promotes the development of new techniques that are applicable to a broader class of problems. Moreover, NEO fosters the understanding and adequate treatment of real-world problems particularly in emerging fields that affect all of us, such as healthcare, smart cities, big data, among many others. The extended papers presented in the book contribute to achieving this goal.  

This volume comprises a selection of works presented at the Numerical and Evolutionary Optimization (NEO) workshop held in September 2015 in Tijuana, Mexico. The development of powerful search and optimization techniques is of great importance in today's world that requires researchers and practitioners to tackle a growing number of challenging real-world problems. In particular, there are two well-established and widely known fields that are commonly applied in this area: (i) traditional numerical optimization techniques and (ii) comparatively recent bio-inspired heuristics. Both paradigms have their unique strengths and weaknesses, allowing them to solve some challenging problems while still failing in others.

The goal of the NEO workshop series is to bring together people from these and related fields to discuss, compare and merge their complimentary perspectives in order to develop fast and reliable hybrid methods that maximize the strengths and minimize the weaknesses of the underlying paradigms. Through this effort, we believe that the NEO can promote the development of new techniques that are applicable to a broader class of problems. Moreover, NEO fosters the understanding and adequate treatment of real-world problems particularly in emerging fields that affect us all such as health care, smart cities, big data, among many others. The extended papers the NEO 2015 that comprise this book make a contribution to this goal.

Genetic Programming Theory and Practice brings together some of the most impactful researchers in the field of Genetic Programming (GP), each one working on unique and interesting intersections of theoretical development and practical applications of this evolutionary-based machine learning paradigm. Topics of particular interest for this year’s book include powerful modeling techniques through GP-based symbolic regression, novel selection mechanisms that help guide the evolutionary process, modular approaches to GP, and applications in cybersecurity, biomedicine, and program synthesis, as well as papers by practitioner of GP that focus on usability and real-world results. In summary, readers will get a glimpse of the current state of the- art in GP research.