PLEASE: A Prototype Learning System Using Genetic Algorithms
Leslie Knight, Sandip Sen · 1995
Prototypes have been proposed as representation of concepts that are used effectively by humans. Developing computational schemes for generating prototypes from examples, however, has proved to be a difficult problem. We present a novel genetic algorithm based prototype learning system, PLEASE, for constructing appropriate prototypes from classified training instances. After constructing a set of prototypes for each of the possible classes, the class of a new input instance is determined by the nearest prototype to this instance. Attributes are assumed to be ordinal in nature and prototypes are represented as sets of feature-value pairs. A genetic algorithm is used to evolve the number of prototypes per class and their positions on the input space. We present experimental results on a series of artificial problems of varying complexity. PLEASE performs competitively with several nearest neighbor classification algorithms on the problem set. An analysis of the strengths and weaknesses o...