On the use of hyperspheres in artificial immune systems as antibody recognition regions

Abstract

Using hyperspheres as antibody recognition regions is an established abstraction which was initially proposed by theoretical immunologists for use in the modeling of antibody-antigen interactions. This abstraction is also employed in the development of many artificial immune system algorithms. Here, we show several undesirable properties of hyperspheres, especially when operating in high dimensions and discuss the problems of hyperspheres as recognition regions and how they have affected overall performance of certain algorithms in the context of real-valued negative selection. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2006.