Absumption and subsumption based learning classifier systems
Yi Liu, Will Neil Browne, Bing Xue · 2020
Learning Classifier Systems (LCSs) are a group of rule-based evolutionary computation techniques, which have been frequently applied to data-mining tasks. Evidence shows that LCSs can produce models containing human-discernible patterns. But, traditional LCSs cannot efficiently discover consistent, general rules - especially in domains that have unbalanced class distribution. The reason is that traditional search methods, e.g. crossover, mutation, and roulette wheel deletion, rely on stochasticity to find and keep optimum rules. Recently, absumption has been introduced to deterministically remove over-general rules, which is complementary to subsumption that deterministically removes over-specific rules. It is hypothesized that utilizing just assumption & subsumption transforms the search process from stochastic to deterministic, which benefits LCSs in evolving interpretable models and removing the need to tune search parameters to the problem. Interrogatable artificial Boolean domains with varying numbers of attributes are considered as benchmarks. The new LCS, termed Absumption Subsumption Classifier System (ASCS), successfully produces interpretable models for all the complex domains tested, whereas the non-optimal rules in existing techniques obscure the patterns. ACSC's ability to handle complex search spaces is observed, e.g. for the 14-bits Majority-On problem the required 6435 different cooperating rules were discovered enabling correct pattern visualization.