Taxonomy

The Artificial Immune Recognition System belongs to the field of Artificial Immune Systems, and more broadly to the field of Computational Intelligence. It was extended early to the canonical version called the Artificial Immune Recognition System 2 (AIRS2) and provides the basis for extensions such as the Parallel Artificial Immune Recognition System [Watkins2004]. It is related to other Artificial Immune System algorithms such as the Dendritic Cell Algorithm, the Clonal Selection Algorithm, and the Negative Selection Algorithm.

Inspiration

The Artificial Immune Recognition System is inspired by the Clonal Selection theory of acquired immunity. The clonal selection theory credited to Burnet was proposed to account for the behavior and capabilities of antibodies in the acquired immune system [Burnet1957] [Burnet1959]. Inspired itself by the principles of Darwinian natural selection theory of evolution, the theory proposes that antigens select-for lymphocytes (both B and T-cells). When a lymphocyte is selected and binds to an antigenic determinant, the cell proliferates making many thousands more copies of itself and differentiates into different cell types (plasma and memory cells). Plasma cells have a short lifespan and produce vast quantities of antibody molecules, whereas memory cells live for an extended period in the host anticipating future recognition of the same determinant. The important feature of the theory is that when a cell is selected and proliferates, it is subjected to small copying errors (changes to the genome called somatic hypermutation) that change the shape of the expressed receptors. It also affects the subsequent determinant recognition capabilities of both the antibodies bound to the lymphocytes cells surface, and the antibodies that plasma cells produce.

Strategy

The information processing objective of the technique is to prepare a set of real-valued vectors to classify patterns. The Artificial Immune Recognition System maintains a pool of memory cells that are prepared by exposing the system to a single iteration of the training data. Candidate memory cells are prepared when the memory cells are insufficiently stimulated for a given input pattern. A process of cloning and mutation of cells occurs for the most stimulated memory cell. The clones compete with each other for entry into the memory pool based on stimulation and on the amount of resources each cell is using. This concept of resources comes from prior work on Artificial Immune Networks, where a single cell (an Artificial Recognition Ball or ARB) represents a set of similar cells. Here, a cell’s resources are a function of its stimulation to a given input pattern and the number of clones it may create.

Implementation

http://www.cleveralgorithms.com/nature-inspired/immune/airs.rb