Mechanisms to alleviate over-generalization in XCS for continuous-valued input spaces

Abstract

In the field of rule-based approaches to Machine Learning , the XCS classifier system (XCS) is a well-known representative of the learning classifier systems family. By using a genetic algorithm (GA), the XCS aims at forming rules or so-called classifiers which are as general as possible to achieve an optimal performance level. A too high generalization pressure may lead to over-general classifiers degrading the performance of XCS. To date, no method exists for XCS for real-valued input spaces (XCSR) and XCS for function approximation (XCSF) to handle over-general classifiers ensuring an accurate population. The Absumption mechanism and the Specify operator, both developed for XCS with binary inputs, provide a promising basis for over-generality handling in XCSR and XCSF. This paper introduces adapted versions of Absumption and Specify by proposing different identification and specialization strategies for the application in XCSR and XCSF. To determine their potential, the adapted techniques are evaluated in different classification problems, i.e., common benchmarks and real-world data from the agricultural domain, in a multi-step problem as well as different regression tasks. Our experimental results show that the application of these techniques leads to significant improvements of the accuracy of the generated classifier population in the applied benchmarks, data sets, multi-step problems and regression tasks, especially when they tend to form over-general classifiers. Furthermore, considering the working principle of the proposed techniques, the intended decrease in overall classifier generality can be confirmed.