An analysis of matching in learning classifier systems

Martin V. Butz, Pier Luca Lanzi, Xavier Llorà, Daniele Loiacono
2008 Proceedings of the 10th annual conference on Genetic and evolutionary computation - GECCO '08  
We investigate rule matching in learning classifier systems for problems involving binary and real inputs. We consider three rule encodings: the widely used character-based encoding, a specificity-based encoding, and a binary encoding used in Alecsys. We compare the performance of the three algorithms both on matching alone and on typical test problems. The results on matching alone show that the population generality influences the performance of the matching algorithms based on string
more » ... tations in different ways. Character-based encoding becomes slower and slower as generality increases, specificity-based encoding becomes faster and faster as generality increases. The results on typical test problems show that the specificity-based representation can halve the time required for matching but also that binary encoding is about ten times faster on the most difficult problems. Moreover, we extend specificity-based encoding to real-inputs and propose an algorithm that can halve the time require for matching real inputs using an interval-based representation.
doi:10.1145/1389095.1389359 dblp:conf/gecco/ButzLLL08 fatcat:mhqe333fsrhkhlvbj3uhui2od4