An Approach to Analyze Niche Evolution in XCS Models
This provides a tool for analyzing XCS behavior, but it is incremental as it builds on existing XCS principles without major innovations.
The authors developed a method to identify and track niche evolution in XCS models, applicable to any XCS model and problem, requiring minimal implementation changes. They demonstrated its effectiveness on binary single-step and multi-step problems, showing it can identify niche numbers and track their composition over time.
We present an approach to identify and track the evolution of niches in XCS that can be applied to any XCS model and any problem. It exploits the underlying principles of the evolutionary component of XCS, and therefore, it is independent of the representation used. It also employs information already available in XCS and thus requires minimal modifications to an existing XCS implementation. We present experiments on binary single-step and multi-step problems involving non-overlapping and highly overlapping solutions. We show that our approach can identify and evaluate the number of niches in the population; it also show that it can be used to identify the composition of active niches to as to track their evolution over time, allowing for a more in-depth analysis of XCS behavior.