Asynchronous cellular automata and pattern classification

This article designs an efficient two‐class pattern classifier utilizing asynchronous cellular automata (ACAs). The two‐state three‐neighborhood one‐dimensional ACAs that converge to fixed points from arbitrary seeds are used here for pattern classification. To design the classifier, (1) we first identify a set of ACAs that always converge to fixed points from any seeds, (2) each ACA should have at least two but not huge number of fixed point attractors, and (3) the convergence time of these ACAs are not to be exponential. To address the second issue, we propose a graph, coined as fixed point graph of an ACA that facilitates in counting the fixed points. We further perform an experimental study to estimate the convergence time of ACAs, and find there are some convergent ACAs which demand exponential convergence time. Finally, we identify there are 73 (out of 256) ACAs which can be effective candidates as pattern classifier. We use each of the candidate ACAs on some standard datasets, and observe the effectiveness of each ACAs as pattern classifier. It is observed that the proposed classifier is very competitive and performs reliably better than many standard existing classifier algorithms. © 2016 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Complexity 21: 370–386, 2016