TY - CONF T1 - Adapting the Fitness Function in GP for Data Mining T2 - Springer Lecture Notes on Computer Science Y1 - 1999 A1 - Eggermont, J. A1 - Eiben, A. E. A1 - van Hemert, J. I. ED - R. Poli ED - P. Nordin ED - W. B. Langdon ED - T. C. Fogarty KW - data mining KW - genetic programming AB - In this paper we describe how the Stepwise Adaptation of Weights (SAW) technique can be applied in genetic programming. The SAW-ing mechanism has been originally developed for and successfully used in EAs for constraint satisfaction problems. Here we identify the very basic underlying ideas behind SAW-ing and point out how it can be used for different types of problems. In particular, SAW-ing is well suited for data mining tasks where the fitness of a candidate solution is composed by `local scores' on data records. We evaluate the power of the SAW-ing mechanism on a number of benchmark classification data sets. The results indicate that extending the GP with the SAW-ing feature increases its performance when different types of misclassifications are not weighted differently, but leads to worse results when they are. JF - Springer Lecture Notes on Computer Science PB - Springer-Verlag, Berlin SN - 3-540-65899-8 ER -