A negative selection algorithm for classification and reduction of the noise effect

Artificial Immune Systems (AIS) are a type of intelligent algorithm inspired by the principles and processes of the human immune system. In the last decade, applications of AIS have been studied in various fields. In the application of change/anomaly detection, negative selection algorithms of AIS have been successfully applied. However, negative selection algorithms are not appropriate for multi-class classification problems, because they do not have a mechanism to minimize the danger of overfitting and oversearching. In this paper, we propose a new algorithm to overcome this drawback and to extend the application area of negative selection algorithms to multi-class classification. The algorithm we propose is named Artificial Negative Selection Classifier (ANSC). We investigate the tolerance of ANSC against noise, and introduce a method to reduce the effect of noise into ANSC. The accuracy and data reduction are compared with those from the Artificial Immune Recognition System (AIRS), which is a well known and effective classifier of AIS. The results show that our algorithm is useful for classification problems and the reduction of the noise effect. (C) 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.