Abstract
This paper surveys the major works related to an artificial immune system based classifier that was proposed in the 2000s, namely, the artificial immune recognition system (AIRS) algorithm. This survey has revealed that most works on AIRS was dedicated to the application of the algorithm to real-world problems rather than to theoretical developments of the algorithm. Based on this finding, we propose an improved version of the AIRS algorithm which we dub AIRS3. AIRS3 takes into account an important parameter that was ignored by the original algorithm, namely, the number of training antigens represented by each memory cell at the end of learning (numRepAg). Experiments of the new AIRS3 algorithm on data sets taken from the UCI machine learning repository have shown that taking into account the numRepAg information enhances the classification accuracy of AIRS.