08-16-2017, 10:33 PM
Biology The self-reactive lymphocyte suppression process is termed clonal deletion and is carried out through a mechanism called negative selection that operates on lymphocytes during maturation. For T cells, this occurs mainly in the thymus, which provides an environment rich in antigen-presenting cells that display autoantigens. Immature T cells that strongly bind to these autoantigens undergo controlled death (apoptosis). Therefore, the T cells that survive this process must be non-reactive to the autoantigens. The property of lymphocytes not to react to self is called immunological tolerance
The Algorithm The negative selection algorithms are inspired by the main mechanism in the thymus that produces a set of mature T cells capable of binding only to non-autonomous antigens. The first negative selection algorithm was proposed by Forrest et al (1994) to detect the manipulation of data caused by a virus in a computer system. The starting point of this algorithm is to produce a set of own strings, S, that define the normal state of the system. The task then is to generate a set of detectors, D, which only link / recognise the complement of S. These detectors can then be applied to new data to classify them as autonomous or not, therefore in the case of the original work of Forrest Et al, highlighting the fact that the data has been manipulated.