Learning control strategies for chemical processes: a distributed approach

The design of a distributed learning system (DLS) which combines the features of instance-space and hypothesis-space methods is described. This algorithm decomposes a data set of training examples into subsets. After applying an inductive learning program on each subset, it synthesizes the results using a genetic algorithm. It is shown that this parallel distributed approach is more efficient, since each inductive learning program works on only a subset of data. Since the genetic algorithm searches globally in the hypothesis space, this approach gives a more accurate concept description. The implementation of DLS in Common LISP is discussed, and its distributed approach is compared to C4.5 and PLS1 algorithms.<>