Abstract
Functional piecewise approximation seeks data representation that is compact, highly simplified and meaningful. This study presents a genetic algorithm (GA)-based approach for computing a piecewise polynomial representation of functions, with the focus being on piecewise linear approximation in an application of biomedical spectral data. The area of piecewise linear approximation has been researched in the past four decades approximately, and the method presented here is compared with another well-known approach. The expansion of this method to piecewise polynomial representation is shown to be straightforward. Finally, the application of this method as a feature extraction method for classification of a dataset of feature vectors, specifically biomedical spectra, is demonstrated.