How evolution learns to generalise: Using the principles of learning theory to understand the evolution of developmental organisation
Fig 3
How generalisation changes over evolutionary time.
The match between phenotypic distributions generated by evolved GRN and the target phenotypes of selective environments the developmental system has been exposed to (training error) and all selective environments (test error) against evolutionary time for (A) moderate environmental switching, (B) noisy environments, (C) favouring weak connectivity and (D) favouring sparse connectivity. The vertical dashed line denotes when the ad-hoc technique of early stopping would be ideal, i.e. at the moment the problem of over-fitting begins. Favouring weak connectivity and jittering exhibits similar effects on test error as applying early stopping.