Novelty-organizing classifiers applied to classification and reinforcement learning: towards flexible algorithms

It is widely known that reinforcement learning is a more general problem than supervised learning. In fact, supervised learning can be seen as a class of reinforcement learning problems. However, only a couple of papers tested reinforcement learning algorithms in supervised learning problems. Here we propose a new and simpler way to abstract supervised learning for any reinforcement learning algorithm. Moreover, a new algorithm called Novelty-Organizing Classifiers is developed based on a Novelty Map population that focuses more on the novelty of the inputs than their frequency. A comparison of the proposed method with Self-Organizing Classifiers and BioHel on some datasets is presented. Even though BioHel is specialized in solving supervised learning problems, the results showed only a trade-off between the algorithms. Lastly, results on a maze problem validate the flexibility of the proposed algorithm beyond supervised learning problems. Thus, Novelty-Organizing Classifiers is capable of solving many supervised learning problems as well as a maze problem without changing any parameter at all. Considering the fact that no adaptation of parameters was executed, the proposed algorithm's basis seems interestingly flexible.