Learning classifier systems for user context learning

Current computer applications and user interfaces lack user context and are not successful in learning user preferences to improve user interaction. We present Sycophant, a context learning calendaring application program which is designed to learn a mapping from user-related contextual features to reminder actions. In this paper, we consider the feasibility of using a genetics-based machine learning technique, XCS, for the purpose of learning this mapping from a set of context features to reminder actions as a predictive data-mining task. We compare XCS's performance with a decision tree algorithm on this learning task and show that XCS outperforms the decision tree learner.