Distributed classifier migration in XCS for classification of electroencephalographic signals

This paper presents an investigation into combining migration strategies inspired by multi-deme Parallel Genetic Algorithms with the XCS Learning Classifier System to provide parallel and distributed classifier migration. Migrations occur between distributed XCS classifier sub-populations using classifiers ranked according to numerosity, fitness or randomly selected. The influence of the degree-of-connectivity introduced by Fully-Connected, Bi-directional Ring and Uni-directional Ring topologies is examined. Results indicate that classifier migration is an effective method for improving classification accuracy, improving learning speed and reducing final classifier population size, in the single-step classification of noisy, artefact-inclusive human electroencephalographic signals. The experimental results will be used as part of our larger research effort investigating the feasibility of using EEG signals as an interface to allow paralysed persons to control a powered wheelchair or other devices. © 2007 IEEE

学習戦略に基づく学習分類子システムの設計

On Learning Classifier Systems dubbed LCSs a leaning strategy which defines how LCSs cover a state-action space in a problem can be one of the most fundamental options in designing LCSs. There lacks an intensive study of the learning strategy to understand whether and how the learning strategy affects the performance of LCSs. This lack has resulted in the current design methodology of LCS which does not carefully consider the types of learning strategy. The thesis clarifies a need of a design methodology of LCS based on the learning strategy. That is, the thesis shows the learning strategy can be an option that determines the potential performance of LCSs and then claims that LCSs should be designed on the basis of the learning strategy in order to improve the performance of LCSs. First, the thesis empirically claims that the current design methodology of LCS, without the consideration of learning strategy, can be limited to design a proper LCS to solve a problem. This supports the need of design methodology based on the learning strategy. Next, the thesis presents an example of how LCS can be designed on the basis of the learning strategy. The thesis empirically show an adequate learning strategy improving the performance of LCS can be decided depending on a type of problem difficulties such as missing attributes. Then, the thesis draws an inclusive guideline that explains which learning strategy should be used to address which types of problem difficulties. Finally, the thesis further shows, on an application of LCS for a human daily activity recognition problem, the adequate learning strategy according to the guideline effectively improves the performance of the application. The thesis concludes that the learning strategy is the option of the LCS design which determines the potential performance of LCSs. Thus, before designing any type of LCSs including their applications, the learning strategy should be adequately selected at first, because their performance degrades when they employ an inadequate learning strategy to a problem they want to solve. In other words, LCSs should be designed on the basis of the adequate learning strategy.電気通信大学201

A brief history of learning classifier systems: from CS-1 to XCS and its variants

© 2015, Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg. The direction set by Wilson’s XCS is that modern Learning Classifier Systems can be characterized by their use of rule accuracy as the utility metric for the search algorithm(s) discovering useful rules. Such searching typically takes place within the restricted space of co-active rules for efficiency. This paper gives an overview of the evolution of Learning Classifier Systems up to XCS, and then of some of the subsequent developments of Wilson’s algorithm to different types of learning

Lexicase selection in Learning Classifier Systems

The lexicase parent selection method selects parents by considering performance on individual data points in random order instead of using a fitness function based on an aggregated data accuracy. While the method has demonstrated promise in genetic programming and more recently in genetic algorithms, its applications in other forms of evolutionary machine learning have not been explored. In this paper, we investigate the use of lexicase parent selection in Learning Classifier Systems (LCS) and study its effect on classification problems in a supervised setting. We further introduce a new variant of lexicase selection, called batch-lexicase selection, which allows for the tuning of selection pressure. We compare the two lexicase selection methods with tournament and fitness proportionate selection methods on binary classification problems. We show that batch-lexicase selection results in the creation of more generic rules which is favorable for generalization on future data. We further show that batch-lexicase selection results in better generalization in situations of partial or missing data.Comment: Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference, 201

Evolutionary computation for software testing

A variety of products undergo a transformation from a pure mechanical design to more and more software and electronic components. A polarized example are watches. Several decades ago they have been purely mechanical. Modern smart watches are almost completely electronic devices which heavily rely on software. Further, a smart watch offers a lot more features than just the information about the current time. This change had a crucial impact on how software is being developed. A first attempt to control the rising complexity was to move to agile development practices such as extreme programming or scrum. This rise in complexity is not only affecting the development process but also quality assurance and software testing. If a product contains more and more features then this leads to a higher number of tests necessary to ensure quality standards. Furthermore agile development practices work in an iterative manner which leads to repetitive testing that puts more effort on the testing team. We aimed within the thesis to ease the pain of testing. Thereby we examined a series of subproblems that arise. A key complexity is the number of test cases. We intended to reduce the number of test cases before they are executed manually or implemented as automated tests. Thereby we examined the test specification and based on the requirements coverage of the individual tests, we were able to identify redundant tests. We relied on a novel metaheuristic called GCAIS which we improved upon iteratively. Another task is to control the remaining complexity. Testing is often time crucial and an appropriate subset of the available tests must be chosen in order to get a quick insight into the status of the device under test. We examined this challenge in two different testing scenarios. The first scenario is located in semi-automated testing where engineers execute a set of automated tests locally and closely observe the behaviour of the system under test. We extended GCAIS to compute test suites that satisfy different criteria if provided with sufficient search time. The second use case is located in fully automated testing in a continuous integration (CI) setting. CI focuses on frequent software build cycles which also include testing. These builds contain a testing stage which greatly emphasizes speed. Thus there we also have to compute crucial tests. However, due to the nature of the process we have to continuously recompute a test suite for each build as the software and maybe even the test cases at hand have changed. Hence it is hard to compute the test suite ahead of time and these tests have to be determined as part of the CI execution. Thus we switched to a computational lightweight learning classifier system (LCS) to prioritize and select test cases. We integrated a series of innovations we made into an LCS known as XCSF such as continuous priorities, experience replay and transfer learning. This enabled us to outperform a state of the art artificial neural network which is used by companies such as Netflix. We further investigated how LCS can be made faster using parallelism. We developed generic approaches which may run on any multicore computing device. This is of interest for our CI use case as the build server's architecture is unknown. However, the methods are also independent of the concrete LCS and are not linked to our testing problem. We identified that many of the challenges that need to be faced in the CI use case have been tackled by Organic Computing (OC), for example the need to adapt to an ever changing environment. Hence we relied on OC design principles to create a system architecture which wraps the LCS developed and integrates it into existing CI processes. The final system is robust and highly autonomous. A side-effect of the high degree of autonomy is a high level of automatization which fits CI well. We also gave insight on the usability and delivery of the full system to our industrial partner. Test engineers can easily integrate it with a few lines of code and need no knowledge about LCS and OC in order to use it. Another implication of the developed system is that OC's ideas and design principles can also be employed outside the field of embedded systems. This shows that OC has a greater level of generality. The process of testing and correcting found errors is still only partially automated. We make a first step into automating the entire process and thereby take an analogy to the concept of self-healing of OC. As a first proof of concept of this school of thought we take a look at touch interfaces. There we can automatically manipulate the software to fulfill the specified behaviour. Thus only a minimalistic amount of manual work is required

MILCS: A mutual information learning classifier system

This paper introduces a new variety of learning classifier system (LCS), called MILCS, which utilizes mutual information as fitness feedback. Unlike most LCSs, MILCS is specifically designed for supervised learning. MILCS's design draws on an analogy to the structural learning approach of cascade correlation networks. We present preliminary results, and contrast them to results from XCS. We discuss the explanatory power of the resulting rule sets, and introduce a new technique for visualizing explanatory power. Final comments include future directions for this research, including investigations in neural networks and other systems. Copyright 2007 ACM

Controlled self-organisation using learning classifier systems

The complexity of technical systems increases, breakdowns occur quite often. The mission of organic computing is to tame these challenges by providing degrees of freedom for self-organised behaviour. To achieve these goals, new methods have to be developed. The proposed observer/controller architecture constitutes one way to achieve controlled self-organisation. To improve its design, multi-agent scenarios are investigated. Especially, learning using learning classifier systems is addressed