Associative memory in artificial immune systems

Abstract

The paper concentrates on analyzing associative properties of Artificial Immune Systems, especially on immunological memory, which is a member of a class of sparse and distributed associative memories [18]. This class of memories derives its associative and robust nature by sparsely sampling the input space and distributing the data among many independent agents [16]. Immunological memory is one of the defining characteristics of the adaptive immune system [4]. This memory is able to store and recall patterns when it is required, and can easily categorize new input data [11]. Immunological memory is distributed among the cells in the AIS memory population, and is robust, because when a portion of the memory population is lost, the remaining memory cells persist to produce a response. The major principle behind vaccination procedures in medicine and immunotherapy takes its source from associative properties of immunological memory [13]. Associative recall is a general phenomenon of immunological memory [18].