Simulated annealing based pattern classification

A method is described for finding decision boundaries, approximated by piecewise linear segments, for classifying patterns in R-n,N greater than or equal to 2, using Simulated Annealing (SA). It involves generation and placement of a set of hyperplanes (represented by strings) in the feature space that yields minimum misclassification. Theoretical analysis shows that as the size of the training data set approaches infinity, the boundary provided by the SA based classifier will approach the Bayes boundary. The effectiveness of the classification methodology, along with the generalization ability of the decision boundary, is demonstrated for both artificial data and real life data sets having non-linear/overlapping class boundaries. Results are compared extensively with those of the Bayes classifier, k-NN rule and multilayer perceptron, and Genetic Algorithms, another popular evolutionary technique. Empirical verification of the theoretical claim is also provided. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science Inc. All rights reserved.