ECoS Toolbox version 1.2

I've just released version 1.2 of the Evolving Connectionist System Toolbox. The toolbox is a collection of command-line applications that implement several algorithms associated with Evolving Connectionist Systems.

This release of the toolbox adds several tools for Nominal-scale Evolving Connectionist Systems (NECoS). This is a modification of the ECoS algorithm so that it can model nominal-scale data directly. While most ANN require nominal-scale data to be transformed into a binary or orthogonal representation, NECoS handle nominal-scale data "as is". This means that new symbols in the input stream can be easily captured by the ANN. In contrast, a binary representation scheme cannot handle symbols that have not been considered, as that would require adding input neurons.

I have also added a tool that compiles trained SECoS ANN into code. So far, the compiler will output code in Python, C++ and C#, where each SECoS compiled is represented as one class. The compiled SECoS are recall-only, and cannot be further trained. There are examples included in the toolbox of how to use the generated code for each of the three languages the tool outputs.

The last group of enhancements (apart from a few minor bug-fixes) are tools that will convert to and from ARFF format data files and the format used by the ECoS toolbox.

These tools are all free to use, but I do request that if you use them in your research, you give credit to them (and me).