Dendritic cell algorithm with fuzzy inference system for input signal generation

Dendritic cell algorithm (DCA) is a binary classification system developed by abstracting the biological danger theory and the functioning of human dendritic cells. The DCA takes three signals as inputs, including danger, safe and pathogenic associated molecular pattern (PAMP), which are generated in its pre-processing and initialization phase. In particular, after a feature selection process for a given training data set, each selected attribute is assigned to one of the three input signals. Then, these input signals are calculated as the aggregation of their associated features, usually implemented by a simple average function followed by a normalisation process. If a nonlinear relationship exists between a signal and its corresponding selected attributes, the resulting signal using the average function may negatively affect the classification results of the DCA. This work proposes an approach named TSK-DCA to address such limitation by aggregating the assigned features of a signal linearly or non-linearly depending on their inherit relationship using the TSK+ fuzzy inference system. The proposed approach was evaluated and validated using the popular KDD99 data set, and the experimental results indicate the superiority of the proposed approach compared to its conventional counterpart.