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BEAGLE & Buddies.

Richard's Evolutionary Computing page.

BEAGLE (Biological Evolutionary Algorithm Generating Logical Expressions) is back.
A comprehensively revised version of the BEAGLE rule-learning system, written in Python3, is now freely available (2016/08/13). Furthermore, BEAGLE's close relative RUNSTER is now included with the package (2016/09/19).

BEAGLE User Notes .................................   beagling.pdf.
Zipped file with software & test data .........   beagling.zip.

RUNSTER (Regression Using Naturalistic Selection To Evolve Rules)
does for regression what BEAGLE does for classification. It seemed tidier to me not to stuggle to unify the classification and regression functions in a single system. Perhaps at some stage an elegant way of integrating them will occur to me. Meanwhile I think it better to develop each according to its own specific requirements. So RUNSTER modules have now been included in the beagling.zip file, freely available under the GNU licence. RUNSTER's User Notes are also included in the zipped file; for convenience, they can also be obtained from the link below.
RUNSTER User Notes ................................   runster.pdf.

I anticipate making some extensions and improvements to both BEAGLE and RUNSTER over the coming months and years, so user feedback would be appreciated. (One desirable improvement that I intend to keep working on is a more effective way to deal with 'outliers' and/or the 'none-of-the-above' problem.)

BEAGLE never quite went away.
Python3 BEAGLE is actually the third incarnation of the method of Darwinian rule-generation first described in my 1981 Kybernetes article  [pdf here].

For those who remember the second incarnation, PC/BEAGLE, and would like to do a spot of retro rule-finding, I have zipped a file of 1987-vintage PC/BEAGLE software (with a few extra trial datasets added). This can be downloaded here. It won't work in the command-window of Windows. In order to run it under Windows, you'll also need to download DOSBox 0.74, which can be found at the DOSBox site. Copies of the PC/BEAGLE User Guide are rarer than hen's teeth, I'm afraid, but a help-file that seemed fairly thorough in those days does come with the package.

Running PC/BEAGLE under DOSBox does need a couple of work-arounds. Firstly, you'll need to press CTRL/F12 several times to achieve an adequate speed. No need to carry the 1980s nostalgia too far! Secondly, DOSBox occasionally scrambles the name of the leftmost variable in a datafile. I haven't worked out why, but if you append an extra column on the left of your data file, e.g. of sequence numbers, preferably marked with 'X', meaning unusable, in the tag-file, this problem can be circumvented.

Another potential source of irritation is that each input file (data or tagfile) should be pure ANSI, so character sets other than Latin are likely to be rejected. (Notepad and Notepad++ both allow saving in plain ANSI mode.) Also, each input file needs to be ended with a CTRL/Z or "SUB" character, i.e. codepoint 26 decimal. You can always cut & paste this character from the last line of IRIS.TAG, for example, if it is awkward to generate with your keyboard.

[Dateline : 19 September 2016.]
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