IWLCS 2012 - Fifteenth International Workshop on Learning Classifier Systems

Since Learning Classifier Systems (LCSs) were introduced by Holland [1] as a way of applying evolutionary computation to machine learning problems, the LCS paradigm has broadened greatly into a framework encompassing many representations, rule discovery mechanisms, and credit assignment schemes. Current LCS applications range from data mining to automated innovation and on-line control. Classifier systems are a very active area of research, with newer approaches, in particular Wilson's accuracy-based XCS [2], receiving a great deal of attention. LCS are also benefiting from advances in reinforcement learning and other machine learning techniques.
This would be the 15th edition of the workshop, which was initiated in 1992, held at the NASA Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas. Since 1999 the workshop has been held yearly in conjunction with PPSN in 2000 and 2002 and with GECCO in 1999, 2001 and from 2003 to 2011.
Topics of interests include but are not limited to:
Paradigms of LCS (Michigan, Pittsburgh, ...)
Theoretical developments (behavior, scalability and learning bounds, ...)
Representations (binary, real-valued, oblique, non-linear, fuzzy, ...)
Types of target problems (single-step, multiple-step, regression/function approximation, ...)
System enhancements (competent operators, problem structure identification and linkage learning, ...)
LCS for Cognitive Control (architectures, emergent behaviors, ...)
Applications (data mining, medical domains, bioinformatics, intelligence in games ...)
Optimizations and parallel implementations (GPU, matching algorithms)
Interest of the workshop to the Genetic and Evolutionary Computation community LCSs have been an integral part of the evolutionary computation field almost since its beginnings, so this workshop is very interesting for the GEC community for itself, but also because it shares many common research topics with the broader GEC field such as linkage learning, niching techniques, variable-length representations, facet-wise models, etc. Therefore it can attract a broader audience besides the own LCS practitioners. Post-proceedings of the papers accepted for the workshop are published - after an additional selection - as a special issue of the Springer journal Evolutionary Intelligence, which is an extra element of interest for participating in the workshop.