Larry Bull – författare

This book gathers together much of the author’s work – both old and new - to explore a number of the key increases in complexity seen in the natural world, seeking to explain each of them purely in terms of the features of fitness landscapes. In a very straightforward manner, the book introduces basic concepts to help readers follow the main ideas. By using variations of the NK model and including the concept of the Baldwin effect, the author presents new abstract models that are able to explain why sources of evolutionary innovation (genomes, symbiosis, sex, chromosomes, multicellularity) have been selected for and hence how complexity has increased over time in some lineages.

Just over thirty years after Holland first presented the outline for Learning Classifier System paradigm, the ability of LCS to solve complex real-world problems is becoming clear. In particular, their capability for rule induction in data mining has sparked renewed interest in LCS. This book brings together work by a number of individuals who are demonstrating their good performance in a variety of domains.

The first contribution is arranged as follows: Firstly, the main forms of LCS are described in some detail. A number of historical uses of LCS in data mining are then reviewed before an overview of the rest of the volume is presented. The rest of this book describes recent research on the use of LCS in the main areas of machine learning data mining: classification, clustering, time-series and numerical prediction, feature selection, ensembles, and knowledge discovery.