Transformation-based hierarchical decision rules using genetic algorithms and its application to handwriting recognition domain

This paper describes a new approach based on transformation-based learning for extracting hierarchical decision rules. Genetic algorithms are adapted to establish the context environment for transformation operation and the transformation operation can lengthen the life cycle of "good" candidate rules. The experiments are conducted on iris, wine and glass datasets with a 10-fold cross validation setup. The results show that transformation operation can improve the precision of the classifier with a smaller number of rules and generations than hierarchical decision rules. The approach also works well in touching block extraction of Chinese handwritten text.