Data Mining based on Gene Expression Programming and Clonal Selection

A hybrid evolutionary technique is proposed for data mining tasks, which combines the Clonal Selection Principle with Gene Expression Programming (GEP). The proposed algorithm introduces the notion of Data Class Antigens, which is used to represent a class of data. The produced rules are evolved by a clonal selection algorithm, which extends the recently proposed CLONALG algorithm. In the present algorithm, among other new features, a receptor editing step has been incorporated. Moreover, the rules themselves are represented as antibodies, which are coded as GEP chromosomes, in order to exploit the flexibility and the expressiveness of such encoding. The algorithm is tested on some benchmark problems of the UCI repository, and in particular on the set of MONK problems and the Pima Indians Diabetes problem. In both problems, the results in terms of prediction accuracy are very satisfactory, albeit slightly less accurate than those obtained by a standard GEP technique. In terms of convergence rate and computational efficiency, however, the technique proposed here markedly outperforms the standard GEP algorithm.