This research is focused on reducing the average size of the solutions generated by an enhanced GP process without affecting the high predictive accuracy the method exhibits when being applied on a complex, industry proposed, regression problem. As such, the effects the GP enhancements have on bloat have been studied and, finally, a bloat control system based on dynamic depth limiting (DDL) and...

Research objects and research outcomes are proposed to act as a guide to select a proper research method. We, however, recommend that the research question as the essential factor of the research process should guide selection. Based on this idea we here develop taxonomy of research approaches with six categories. Taxonomy is then compared with three other classifications of research methods by...

Necessitism about individuals claims that necessarily every individual necessarily exists. An analogous necessitist thesis attributes necessary existence to properties and relations. Both theses have been defended by Williamson. Furthermore, Williamson specifically argues against the hybrid conjunction of first-order contingentism (the negation of necessitism about individuals) and higher-order...

lution gain in depth and strength when we consider all the evidence together. Scenarios that are most parsimonious for the one dataset are not necessarily the most parsimonious when viewed globally. Jeffrey Rogers Paul B. Samollow Anthony G. Comuzzie Department of Genetics, Southwest Foundation for Biomedical Research, Post Office Box 760549, San Antonio, TX 78245, USA E-mail: [email protected]...

Tuffley and Steel (Bull. Math. Biol. 59:581-607, 1997) proved that maximum likelihood and maximum parsimony methods in phylogenetics are equivalent for sequences of characters under a simple symmetric model of substitution with no common mechanism. This result has been widely cited ever since. We show that small changes to the model assumptions suffice to make the two methods inequivalent. In p...

This paper reports a simulation study comparing and evaluating the performance of different linguistic phylogeny reconstruction methods on model datasets for which the true trees are known. UPGMA performed least well, then (in ascending order) neighbor joining, the method of Gray & Atkinson and finally maximum parsimony. Weighting characters greatly improves the accuracy of maximum parsimony an...