Artificial Immune Systems: A Novel Approach to Pattern Recognition

This chapter introduces a new computational intelligence paradigm to perform pattern recognition, named Artificial Immune Systems (AIS). AIS take inspiration from the immune system in order to build novel computational tools to solve problems in a vast range of domain areas. The basic immune theories used to explain how the immune system perform pattern recognition are described and their corresponding computational models are presented. This is followed with a survey from the literature of AIS applied to pattern recognition. The chapter is concluded with a trade-off between AIS and artificial neural networks as pattern recognition paradigms.