Abstract
In this article, we describe the Naturalistic University of Alberta Nonlinear Correlation Explorer (NUANCE), a computer program for data exploration and analysis. NUANCE is specialized for finding nonlinear relations between any number of predictors and a dependent value to be predicted. It searches the space of possible relations between the predictors and the dependent value by using natural selection to evolve equations that maximize the correlation between their output and the dependent value. In this article, we introduce the program, describe how to use it, and provide illustrative examples. NUANCE is written in Java, which runs on most computer platforms. We have contributed NUANCE to the archival Web site of the Psychonomic Society (www.psychonomic.org/archive), from which it may be freely downloaded.
Article PDF
Similar content being viewed by others
Avoid common mistakes on your manuscript.
References
Andrews, S. (1997). The effect of orthographic similarity on lexical retrieval: Resolving neighborhood conflicts.Psychonomic Bulletin & Review,4, 439–461.
Fraumeni, J. F., Jr. (1968). Cigarette smoking and cancers of the urinary tract: Geographic variation in the United States.Journal of the National Cancer Institute,41, 1205–1211.
Holland, J. (1992).Adaptation in natural and artificial systems: An introductory analysis with applications to biology, control, and artificial intelligence. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Koza, J. (1992).Genetic programming: On the programming of computers by means of natural selection. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Kushchu, I. (2002). Genetic programming and evolutionary generalization.IEEE Transactions on Evolutionary Computation,6, 431–442.
Langdon, W. B. (2000). Quadratic bloat in genetic programming. In D. Whitley, D. Goldberg, E. Cantu-Paz, L. Spector, I. Parmee, & H. Beyer (Eds.),Proceedings of the Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference (GECCO-2000) (pp. 451–458). San Francisco: Morgan Kaufmann.
Langdon, W. B., &Poli, R. (1997).Fitness causes bloat (Tech. Rep. No. CSRP-97-09). Birmingham, U.K.: University of Birmingham, School of Computer Science.
Luke, S., &Spector, L. (1998). A revised comparison of crossover and mutation in genetic programming. In J. Koza, W. Banzhaf, K. Chellapilla, K. Deb, M. Dorigo, D. B. Fogel, et al. (Eds.),Genetic programming 1998: Proceedings of the Third Annual Genetic Programming Conference (pp. 51–84). San Francisco: Morgan Kaufmann.
Moore, F. W., &Garcia, O. N. (1997). A new methodology for reducing brittleness in genetic programming. In E. Pohl (Ed.),Proceedings of the National Aerospace and Electronics 1997 Conference (pp. 757–763). Los Alamitos, CA: IEEE Press.
Soule, T., &Foster, J. A. (1998). Removal bias: A new cause of code growth in tree based evolutionary programming. In D. Fogel (Ed.),1998 IEEE International Conference on Evolutionary Computation (pp. 781–786). Los Alamitos, CA: IEEE Computer Society.
Soule, T., &Foster, J. A. (1999). Effects of code growth and parsimony pressure on populations in genetic programming.Evolutionary Computation,6, 293–309.
Stone, M. (1974). Cross-validation choice and assessment of statistical predictions.Journal of the Royal Statistical Society: Series B,36, 111–147.
Streeter, M. J. (2003). The root causes of code growth in genetic programming. In C. Ryan, T. Soule, M. Keijzer, E. Tsang, R. Poli, & E. Costa (Eds.),Genetic programming: Proceedings of EuroGP 2003 (pp. 449–458). Berlin: Springer.
Westbury, C., Buchanan, L., Sanderson, M., Rhemtulla, M., &Phillips, L. (2003). Using genetic programming to discover nonlinear variable interactions.Behavior Research Methods, Instruments, & Computers,35, 202–216.
Wolfram Research, Inc. (2003). Mathematica (Version 5.0) [Computer program]. Champaign, IL: Author.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Additional information
This work was made possible by a National Engineering and Science Research Council grant from the Government of Canada to C. Westbury. The authors gratefully acknowledge the many useful suggestions received in response to an earlier version of this article and the software from Jonathan Vaughan, Greg Francis, Ian Walker, an anonymous reviewer, and Gail Moroschan.
Electronic supplementary material
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Hollis, G., Westbury, C. NUANCE: Naturalistic University of Alberta Nonlinear Correlation Explorer. Behavior Research Methods 38, 8–23 (2006). https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03192745
Received:
Accepted:
Issue date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03192745