This book is probably best summarized as providing a principled foundation for Learning Classi?er Systems. Something is happening in LCS, and particularly XCS and its variants that clearly often produces good results. Jan Drug- itsch wishes to understand this from a broader machine learning perspective and thereby perhaps to improve the systems. His approach centers on choosing a statistical de?nition – derived from machine learning – of “a good set of cl- si?ers”, based on a model according to which such a set represents the data. For an illustration of this approach, he designs the model to be close to XCS, and tests it by evolving a set of classi?ers using that de?nition as a ?tness criterion, seeing ifthe setprovidesa goodsolutionto twodi?erent function approximation problems. It appears to, meaning that in some sense his de?nition of “good set of classi?ers” (also, in his terms, a good model structure) captures the essence, in machine learning terms, of what XCS is doing. In the process of designing the model, the author describes its components and their training in clear detail and links it to currently used LCS, giving rise to recommendations for how those LCS can directly gain from the design of the model and its probabilistic formulation. The seeming complexity of evaluating the quality ofa set ofclassi?ersis alleviatedby giving analgorithmicdescription of how to do it, which is carried out via a simple Pittsburgh-style LCS.

This accessible introduction shows the reader how to understand, implement, adapt, and apply Learning Classifier Systems (LCSs) to interesting and difficult problems. The text builds an understanding from basic ideas and concepts. The authors first explore learning through environment interaction, and then walk through the components of LCS that form this rule-based evolutionary algorithm. The applicability and adaptability of these methods is highlighted by providing descriptions of common methodological alternatives for different components that are suited to different types of problems from data mining to autonomous robotics. The authors have also paired exercises and a simple educational LCS (eLCS) algorithm (implemented in Python) with this book. It is suitable for courses or self-study by advanced undergraduate and postgraduate students in subjects such as Computer Science, Engineering, Bioinformatics, and Cybernetics, and by researchers, data analysts, and machine learning practitioners.

This book provides a unified framework that describes how genetic learning can be used to design pattern recognition and learning systems. It examines how a search technique, the genetic algorithm, can be used for pattern classification mainly through approximating decision boundaries. Coverage also demonstrates the effectiveness of the genetic classifiers vis-à-vis several widely used classifiers, including neural networks.

Learning Classifier Systems (LCS) are a machine learning paradigm introduced by John Holland in 1976. They are rule-based systems in which learning is viewed as a process of ongoing adaptation to a partially unknown environment through genetic algorithms and temporal difference learning. This book provides a unique survey of the current state of the art of LCS and highlights some of the most promising research directions. The first part presents various views of leading people on what learning classifier systems are. The second part is devoted to advanced topics of current interest, including alternative representations, methods for evaluating rule utility, and extensions to existing classifier system models. The final part is dedicated to promising applications in areas like data mining, medical data analysis, economic trading agents, aircraft maneuvering, and autonomous robotics. An appendix comprising 467 entries provides a comprehensive LCS bibliography.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed joint post-conference proceedings of two consecutive International Workshops on Learning Classifier Systems that took place in Seattle, WA, USA in July 2006, and in London, UK, in July 2007 - all hosted by the Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference, GECCO. The 14 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from the workshop contributions. The papers are organized in topical sections on knowledge representation, analysis of the system, mechanisms, new directions, as well as applications.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed joint post-proceedings of three consecutive International Workshops on Learning Classifier Systems that took place in Chicago, IL in July 2003, in Seattle, WA in June 2004, and in Washington, DC in June 2005. Topics in the 22 revised full papers range from theoretical analysis of mechanisms to practical consideration for successful application of such techniques to everyday datamining tasks.

Machine learning techniques provide cost-effective alternatives to traditional methods for extracting underlying relationships between information and data and for predicting future events by processing existing information to train models. Efficient Learning Machines explores the major topics of machine learning, including knowledge discovery, classifications, genetic algorithms, neural networking, kernel methods, and biologically-inspired techniques. Mariette Awad and Rahul Khanna’s synthetic approach weaves together the theoretical exposition, design principles, and practical applications of efficient machine learning. Their experiential emphasis, expressed in their close analysis of sample algorithms throughout the book, aims to equip engineers, students of engineering, and system designers to design and create new and more efficient machine learning systems. Readers of Efficient Learning Machines will learn how to recognize and analyze the problems that machine learning technology can solve for them, how to implement and deploy standard solutions to sample problems, and how to design new systems and solutions. Advances in computing performance, storage, memory, unstructured information retrieval, and cloud computing have coevolved with a new generation of machine learning paradigms and big data analytics, which the authors present in the conceptual context of their traditional precursors. Awad and Khanna explore current developments in the deep learning techniques of deep neural networks, hierarchical temporal memory, and cortical algorithms. Nature suggests sophisticated learning techniques that deploy simple rules to generate highly intelligent and organized behaviors with adaptive, evolutionary, and distributed properties. The authors examine the most popular biologically-inspired algorithms, together with a sample application to distributed datacenter management. They also discuss machine learning techniques for addressing problems of multi-objective optimization in which solutions in real-world systems are constrained and evaluated based on how well they perform with respect to multiple objectives in aggregate. Two chapters on support vector machines and their extensions focus on recent improvements to the classification and regression techniques at the core of machine learning.