João Batista, LASIGE’s PhD student, moved to Tokyo for a three-month collaboration with professor Hitoshi Iba and his PhD student Kotaro Pindur, from IBA Laboratory at the University of Tokyo, in November 2022.

The aim of this collaboration is to study feature engineering using genetic programming to evolve sets of features that are tailored to the needs of different classifiers. Intuition tells us that the simpler the classification algorithm is, the more complex the feature construction should be and, in opposition, complex classification algorithms should require weaker feature engineering. With this work, the team hopes to confirm this hypothesis and give some insight into the necessities of the different classifiers used in the study.