Attribute weighting via genetic algorithms for attribute weighted artificial immune system (AWAIS) and its application to heart disease and liver disorders problems

An increasing number of algorithms and applications have coming into scene in the field of artificial immune systems (AIS) day by day. Whereas this increase is bringing successful studies, still, AIS is not an effective problem solver in some problem fields such as classification, regression, pattern recognition, etc. So far, many of the developed AIS algorithms have used a distance or similarity measure as the case in instance based learning (IBL) algorithms. The efficiency of IBL algorithms lies mainly in the weighting scheme they used. This weighting idea was taken as the objective of our study in that we used genetic algorithms to determine the weights of attributes and then used these weights in our previously developed Artificial Immune System (AWAIS). We evaluated the performance of new configuration (GA-AWAIS) on two medical datasets which were Statlog Heart Disease and BUPA Liver Disorders dataset. We also compared it with AWAIS for those problems. The obtained classification accuracy was very good with respect to both AWAIS and other common classifiers in literature.