Learning Decision Rules using a Distributed Evolutionary Algorithm

Abstract: A new parallel method for learning decision rules from databases by using an evolutionary algorithm is proposed. We describe an implementation of EDRL-MD system in the cluster of multiprocessor machines connected by Fast Ethernet. Our approach consists in a distribution of the learning set into processors of the cluster. The evolutionary algorithm uses a master-slave model to compute the fitness function in parallel. The remainder of evolutionary algorithm is executed in the master node. The experimental results show, that for large datasets our approach is able to obtain a significant speed-up in comparison to a single processor version