An immune network with TH cell function and its applications to pattern recognition.

The immune function of living bodies has gained attention in engineering applications in a variety of fields. The authors proposed an immune network based on the immune response and researched its application to pattern recognition. The TH cell (helper T cell) that recognizes antigens in the immune response possesses diversity in order to fight various antigens and the function called interaction that communicates mutual information for correctly recognizing the antigens. The TH cell function successfully performs self-defense against unknown antigens. This paper proposes an immune network with the TH cell function added to an immune network we previously proposed. Specifically, we modeled the interaction and diversity functions of the TH cell in the matching process between input patterns and memory patterns. The proposed immune network is applied to a pattern recognition system of the alphabet and compared to a conventional method by numerical simulations. The proposed immune network exhibits lower incorrect recognition and rejections, and further improvement in the recognition rate over a conventional immune network by employing the process modeling the TH cell function. © 2005 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Electron Comm Jpn Pt 3, 88(10): 12–22, 2005; Published online in Wiley InterScience (<URL>www.interscience. wiley.com</URL>). DOI 10.1002/ecjc.20162 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]