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I worked on genetic programming for my MSc in econometrics, used it to build human-readable risk models for time series data. It worked really well. The article

I worked on genetic programming for my MSc in econometrics, used it to build human-readable risk models for time series data. It worked really well. The article seems to call these methods genetic algorithms, though Koza himself (the "godfather" of genetic algorithms & genetic programming) was pretty keen on distinguishing the two. The main difference is that genetic algorithms represent solutions as linear strings / vectors whereas genetic programming works on tree structures. Maybe just splitting hairs here though.

pmoriarty 4y ago
"The main difference is that genetic algorithms represent solutions as linear strings / vectors whereas genetic programming works on tree structures." Yes, that and that the tree data structure used by genetic programming tends to have functions in every non-leaf node, and static values or variables in the leaf nodes.
optimalsolver 4y ago
It should also be emphasized that genetic programming is just one approach to program synthesis, i.e. automatically deriving computer programs from data. You don't have to use genetic/evolutionary algorithms to search the space of programs, it's just the most popular method. You can even try pure random search if you're feeling particularly lucky: https://github.com/pySRURGS/pySRURGS https://github.com/pySRURGS/pySRURGS