jmmcdHave you ever seen an #EvolutionaryAlgorithm evolve to "extinction"? By that I mean that fitness is gradually improving over multiple generations and then suddenly falls off a cliff to a lower bound, and never recovers. A student saw it in some code we were hacking recently. The cause was obvious, in retrospect.
nmc@jmmcd I use #EvolutionaryAlgorithms for regression mainly and see this behavior often.
@nmc I guess you mean #GeneticProgramming #SymbolicRegression..? I do a lot of that too, but never saw this behaviour before. Overfitting yes, but not sudden drop in train fitness. Has it been described before? It's definitely interesting because the mechanism we saw should indeed be possible in a space of trees. Ours was in bitstrings, but a special case.