Extracting and reusing blocks of knowledge in learning classifier systems for text classification: a lifelong machine learning approach

Human beings follow a continuous learning paradigm, i.e., they learn to solve smaller and relatively easy problems, retain the learnt knowledge and apply that knowledge to learn and solve more complex and large-scale problems of the domain. Currently, most machine learning and evolutionary computing systems lack this ability to reuse the previous learnt knowledge. This paper presents a lifelong machine learning model for text classification that extracts the useful knowledge from simple problems of a domain and reuses the learnt knowledge to learn complex problems of the domain. The proposed approach adopts a rule-based learning classifier system, and a rich encoding scheme is used to extract and reuse building units of knowledge. The experimental results show that the continuous learning approach outperformed the baseline classifier system.