Clustering-based initialization of Learning Classifier Systems

The present paper investigates whether an “informed” initialization process can help supervised LCS algorithms evolve rulesets with better characteristics, including greater predictive accuracy, shorter training times, and/or more compact knowledge representations. Inspired by previous research suggesting that the initialization phase of evolutionary algorithms may have a considerable impact on their convergence speed and the quality of the achieved solutions, we present an initialization method for the class of supervised Learning Classifier Systems (LCS) that extracts information about the structure of studied problems through a pre-training clustering phase and exploits this information by transforming it into rules suitable for the initialization of the learning process. The effectiveness of our approach is evaluated through an extensive experimental phase, involving a variety of real-world classification tasks. Obtained results suggest that clustering-based initialization can indeed improve the predictive accuracy, as well as the interpretability of the induced knowledge representations, and paves the way for further investigations of the potential of better-than-random initialization methods for LCS algorithms.