  Noise is a consequence of acquiring and pre-processing data from the
environment, and shows fluctuations from different sources---e.g., from
sensors, signal processing technology or even human error. As a machine
learning technique, Genetic Programming (GP) is not immune to this problem,
which the field has frequently addressed. Recently, Geometric Semantic Genetic
Programming (GSGP), a semantic-aware branch of GP, has shown robustness and
high generalization capability. Researchers believe these characteristics may
be associated with a lower sensibility to noisy data. However, there is no
systematic study on this matter. This paper performs a deep analysis of the
GSGP performance over the presence of noise. Using 15 synthetic datasets where
noise can be controlled, we added different ratios of noise to the data and
compared the results obtained with those of a canonical GP. The results show
that, as we increase the percentage of noisy instances, the generalization
performance degradation is more pronounced in GSGP than GP. However, in
general, GSGP is more robust to noise than GP in the presence of up to 10% of
noise, and presents no statistical difference for values higher than that in
the test bed.
