An Ant Colony Optimization approach for symbolic regression using Straight Line Programs. Application to energy consumption modelling

摘要

The increase of energy consumption and their direct effects on pollution and global warming have motivated governments to develop new strategies to promote a better usage of energy. One of the most important aspects related to energy efficiency is the need for a suitable model of energy consumption that can be used to make predictions or to aid experts in high level decision making processes. Symbolic regression techniques can be used to discover an energy consumption model that fits these purposes. Traditionally, the problem of symbolic regression has been solved by using genetic programming approaches to find the algebraic expression that best fits the regression problem data, where each expression is encoded as a tree structure. In previous works, we found that a different approach using Straight Line Programs as a representation technique could provide promising results for symbolic regression, although the size of the resulting algebraic expression might be increased when compared to the traditional approach. This work proposes an Ant Colony Optimization algorithm for Straight Line Programs to solve the problem, and makes a study to compare the approach with traditional genetic programming in a real energy consumption modelling problem. (C) 2020 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.