Optimised Coverage of Non-self with Evolved Lymphocytes in an Artificial Immune System

The natural immune system (NIS) protects the body against unwanted foreign material (non-self cells) that could damage the body (self cells). The NIS can be modeled into an artificial immune system (AIS) to detect any non-self patterns in a non-biological environment. Detectors in the NIS can change from their initial mature status to memory status detectors or to annihilated status. A memory detector is a detector that fre- quently detects non-self cells and is a general detector for a sub- set of non-self cells. The NIS uses these memory detectors in a faster response to non-self cells. The purpose of this paper is to present the genetic artificial immune system (GAIS) which evolves these non-self detectors and determine their state using a life counter function. Only detectors with mature or memory status are used to detect non-self. Thus, the number of detectors is dynamically determined by the life counter function. In the paper GAIS is applied to different classification problems.