LCS and other GBML

Archive for 'Proceedings' Category

LCS & GBML Central: Community resource is now Online

27 March 2009

LCSweb was designed to allow researchers and those seeking to use Learning Classifier Systems within applications access to material on LCS and discussion between members of the LCS community. The site served this community since its was started by Alwyn Barry in 1997. Enhanced and maintained later by Jan Drugowitsch, LCSweb became a valuable community resource. The site was completely community-driven and allowed members to contribute to the content of the site and keeping it up to date.  Later on in 2005, I started “LCS and other GBML” Blog to cover a gap providing information information regarding the International Workshop on Learning Classifier Systems (IWLCS), the collection of LCS Books available, and GBML related news.Some of you may have realized that after Jan’s move to Rochester and Alwyn’s retirement from research activities, LCSweb has vanished. Will Browne took on himself to take LCSweb to Reading, but technical circumstances have made that move rocky despite his best efforts. Jan and Will however still have a local copy of LCSweb contents. After talking to Jan and Will, I proposed to merge LCSweb with the LCS and other GBML blog, and host the new site at NCSA where dedicated resources has been made available. Jan and Will agreed with the idea.  The current progress merging both sites can be summarized as  follows:Done:

• Resources for hosting are available at NCSA
• LCS and other GBML blog has been moved to NCSA (the old one will still be there for historic reasons and no updates will be made to it)
• A new name for the new merged site has been proposed (LCS & GBML Central)

In progress:

• Jan has taken upon himself to start slowly migrating the old content  into the new site (be patient, he is doing that manually for which we should be very thank full)

Besides, we have added two extra features to the site

1. Automatic aggregation of feeds (some of you may know this as you may have seen in so call planet sites). I just did a quick list of feeds that I knew and added them to the aggregator. Unfortunately, few of the sites of our community provided feeds, so I would encourage everybody to think about it. Why may this be important? The updates of those feeds go straight into LCS & GBML Central. That would make possible to create one stop place for information in the LCS and GBML community, and still maintain each separate member’s identity (you will see that when you click on an aggregated entry, you will be directed to the originators site)
2. Added forums to complement the LCS and GBML mailing list. Not to sure how useful will be, but at least it may help to jump in and ask questions (moderators volunteers more than welcome).

As mentioned above, the site is still on the building steps. LCSweb relevant content will be migrated slowly, but the main place holders are already there for your evaluation. Since this is a site for the community, we would love to hear about your feedback and ideas. As soon as new steps are conquered, we will keep you posted. Also, if you would like to help with the site, content transition, or know about  related feeds that should be aggregated please drop us an email, and  make this community your community.LCS & GBML Central can be reach at

• http://lcs-gbml.ncsa.uiuc.edu/

Best,Jan, Will, and Xavier

Advances at the frontier of LCS: LNCS 4399

8 January 2007

“Advances at the frontier of Learning Classifier Systems” has been shipped to Springer for the final stages of editing and printing. The volume is going to be printed as Springer’s LNCS 4399 volume. When we started editing this volume, we faced the choice of organizing the contents in a purely chronological fashion or as a sequence of related topics that help walk the reader across the different areas. In the end we decided to organize the contents by area, breaking a little the time-line. This was not a simple endeavor as we could organize the material using multiple criteria. The taxonomy below is our humble effort to provide a coherent grouping. Needless to say, some works may fall in more than one category. Below, you may find the tentative table of contents of the volume. It may change a little bit, but we will keep you posted as soon as we learn from Springer.

Part I. Knowledge representation

• 1. Analyzing Parameter Sensitivity and Classifier Representations for Real-valued XCS
  by Atsushi Wada, Keiki Takadama, Katsunori Shimohara, and Osamu Katai
  4399 - 001
• 2. Use of Learning Classifier System for Inferring Natural Language Grammar
  by Olgierd Unold and Grzegorz Dabrowski
  4399 - 018
• 3. Backpropagation in Accuracy-based Neural Learning Classifier Systems
  by Toby O’Hara and Larry Bull
  4399 - 026
• 4. Binary Rule Encoding Schemes: A Study Using The Compact Classifier System
  by Xavier Llorà, Kumara Sastry , and David E. Goldberg
  4399 - 041

Part II. Mechanisms

• 5. Bloat control and generalization pressure using the minimum description length principle for a Pittsburgh approach Learning Classifier System
  by Jaume Bacardit and Josep Maria Garrell
  4399 - 061
• 6. Post-processing Clustering to Decrease Variability in XCS Induced Rulesets
  by Flavio Baronti, Alessandro Passaro, and Antonina Starita
  4399 - 081
• 7. LCSE: Learning Classifier System Ensemble for Incremental Medical Instances
  by Yang Gao, Joshua Zhexue Huang, Hongqiang Rong, and Da-qian Gu
  4399 - 094
• 8. Effect of Pure Error-Based Fitness in XCS
  by Martin V. Butz , David E. Goldberg, and Pier Luca Lanzi
  4399 - 105
• 9. A Fuzzy System to Control Exploration Rate in XCS
  by Ali Hamzeh and Adel Rahmani
  4399 - 116
• 10. Counter Example for Q-bucket-brigade under Prediction Problema
  by Atsushi Wada, Keiki Takadama, and Katsunori Shimohara
  4399 - 130
• 11. An Experimental Comparison between ATNoSFERES and ACS
  by Samuel Landau, Olivier Sigaud, Sébastien Picault, and Pierre Gérard
  4399 - 146
• 12. The Class Imbalance Problem in UCS Classifier System: A Preliminary Study
  by Albert Orriols-Puig and Ester Bernadó-Mansilla
  4399 - 164
• 13. Three Methods for Covering Missing Input Data in XCS
  by John H. Holmes, Jennifer A. Sager, and Warren B. Bilker
  4399 - 184

Part III. New Directions

• 14. A Hyper-Heuristic Framework with XCS: Learning to Create Novel Problem-Solving Algorithms Constructed from Simpler Algorithmic Ingredients
  by Javier G. Marín-Blázquez and Sonia Schulenburg
  4399 - 197
• 15. Adaptive value function approximations in classifier systems
  by Lashon B. Booker
  4399 - 224
• 16. Three Architectures for Continuous Action
  by Stewart W. Wilson
  4399 - 244
• 17. A Formal Relationship Between Ant Colony Optimizers and Classifier Systems
  by Lawrence Davis
  4399 - 263
• 18. Detection of Sentinel Predictor-Class Associations with XCS: A Sensitivity Analysis
  by John H. Holmes
  4399 - 276

Part IV. Application-oriented research and tools

• 19. Data Mining in Learning Classifier Systems: Comparing XCS with GAssist
  by Jaume Bacardit and Martin V. Butz
  4399 - 290
• 20. Improving the Performance of a Pittsburgh Learning Classifier System Using a Default Rule
  by Jaume Bacardit, David E. Goldberg, and Martin V. Butz
  4399 - 299
• 21. Using XCS to Describe Continuous-Valued Problem Spaces
  by David Wyatt, Larry Bull, and Ian Parmee
  4399 - 318
• 22. The EpiXCS Workbench: A Tool for Experimentation and Visualization
  by John H. Holmes and Jennifer A. Sager
  4399 - 343

Advances at the frontier of LCS (Volume I) is coming

1 December 2005

The final editing of the volume Advances at the frontier of LCS to be published by Springer is advancing at steady pace. The volume is going to be an overview of the research LCS and other GBML presented at IWLCS. The volume will cover 2003, 2004, and 2005 contributions.

So far, these are the raw numbers for 2003 and 2004 contributions:

• 2003: 11 chapters by 26 different authors
• 2004: 8 chapters by 15 different authors

The decisions about 2005 will be out soon. We will keep you posted

Camera ready instructions for IWLCS 2003 and 2004 proceedings

7 November 2005

Springer has agreed to publish the compilation volume Advances in Learning Classifier Systems (the title may be slightly changed) including contributions from the International Workshop of Learning Classifier Systems in its editions of 2003, 2004, and 2005. This volume will present an overview of the work presented in the last three years of the workshop and will include up to 30 contributions.

The deadline for the camera-ready of your contribution to IWLCS was initially set to November 15. Due to the previous delay, we would extend this deadline until November 25 for your convenience. Please do not to hesitate to get in touch if you may not be able to reach this deadline. Due to the size of this volume, we would like to stick to this deadline to be able to have the volume ready for the next workshop edition in Seattle.

For further instructions about how to prepare your camera ready please check the Springer format instructions for authors at

• Springer instructions for authors
• Series information

Contributions should not exceed 20 pages. Authors providing camera- readies that do not complain with the LNCS format or exceed the maximum number of pages will be ask to resubmit them, and may not be included if time constraints do not allow us to do so.