Immunity-based hybrid learning methods for approximator structure and parameter adjustment

From the point of view of information processing the immune system is a highly parallel and distributed intelligent system which has learning, memory, and associative retrieval capabilities. In this paper we present two immunity-based hybrid learning approaches for function approximation (or regression) problems that involve adjusting the structure and parameters of spatially localized models (e.g., radial basis function networks). The number and centers of the receptive fields for local models are specified by immunity-based structure adaptation algorithms, while the parameters of the local models, which enter in a linear fashion, are tuned separately using a least-squares method. The effectiveness of the procedure is demonstrated through a nonlinear function approximation problem and a nonlinear dynamical system modeling problem. © 2003 Published by Elsevier Science Ltd.