WAIRS: Improving Classification Accuracy by Weighting Attributes in the AIRS Classifier

AIRS (Artificial Immune Recognition System) has shown itself to be a competitive classifier. It has also proved to be the most popular immune inspired classifier. However, rather than AIRS being a classifier in its own right as previously described, we see AIRS more as a pre-processor to a KNN classifier. It is our view that by not explicitly classing it as such development of this algorithm has been rather held back. Seeing it as a pre-processor allows inspiration to be taken from the machine learning literature where such pre-processors are not uncommon. With this in mind, this paper takes a core feature of many such pre-processors, that of attribute weighting, and applies it to AIRS. The resultant algorithm called WAIRS (Weighted AIRS) uses a weighted distance function during all affinity evaluations. WAIRS is tested on 9 benchmark datasets and is found to outperform AIRS in the majority of cases.