Evolutionary generation of prototypes for a learning vector quantization classifier

Abstract

An evolutionary computation based algorithm for data classification is presented. The proposed algorithm refers to the learning vector quantization paradigm and is able to evolve sets of points in the feature space in order to find the class prototypes. The more remarkable feature of the devised approach is its ability to discover the right number of prototypes needed to perform the classification task without requiring any a priori knowledge on the properties of the data analyzed. The effectiveness of the approach has been tested on satellite images and the obtained results have been compared with those obtained by using other classifiers. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2006.