A self-organized, distributed, and adaptive rule-based induction system

Learning classifier systems (LCSs) are rule-based inductive learning systems that have been widely used in the field of supervised and reinforcement learning over the last few years. This paper employs sUpervised Classifier System (UCS), a supervised learning classifier system, that was introduced in 2003 for classification tasks in data mining. We present an adaptive framework of UCS on top of a self-organized map (SOM) neural network. The overall classification problem is decomposed adaptively and in real time by the SOM into subproblems, each of which is handled by a separate UCS. The framework is also tested with replacing UCS by a feedforward artificial neural network (ANN). Experiments on several synthetic and real data sets, including a very large real data set, show that the accuracy of classifications in the proposed distributed environment is as good or better than in the nondistributed environment, and execution is faster. In general, each UCS attached to a cell in the SOM has a much smaller population size than a single UCS working on the overall problem; since each data instance is exposed to a smaller population size than in the single population approach, the throughput of the overall system increases. The experiments show that the proposed framework can decompose a problem adaptively into subproblems, maintaining or improving accuracy and increasing speed. © 2009 IEEE.