Literature Review of the Recent Trends and Applications in various Fuzzy Rule based systems

Fuzzy rule based systems (FRBSs) is a rule-based system which uses linguistic fuzzy variables as antecedents and consequent to represent human understandable knowledge. They have been applied to various applications and areas throughout the soft computing literature. However, FRBSs suffers from many drawbacks such as uncertainty representation, high number of rules, interpretability loss, high computational time for learning etc. To overcome these issues with FRBSs, there exists many extensions of FRBSs. This paper presents an overview and literature review of recent trends on various types and prominent areas of fuzzy systems (FRBSs) namely genetic fuzzy system (GFS), hierarchical fuzzy system (HFS), neuro fuzzy system (NFS), evolving fuzzy system (eFS), FRBSs for big data, FRBSs for imbalanced data, interpretability in FRBSs and FRBSs which use cluster centroids as fuzzy rules. The review is for years 2010-2021. This paper also highlights important contributions, publication statistics and current trends in the field. The paper also addresses several open research areas which need further attention from the FRBSs research community.Comment: 49 pages, Accepted for publication in ijf

An artificial immune systems based predictive modelling approach for the multi-objective elicitation of Mamdani fuzzy rules: a special application to modelling alloys

In this paper, a systematic multi-objective Mamdani fuzzy modeling approach is proposed, which can be viewed as an extended version of the previously proposed Singleton fuzzy modeling paradigm. A set of new back-error propagation (BEP) updating formulas are derived so that they can replace the old set developed in the singleton version. With the substitution, the extension to the multi-objective Mamdani Fuzzy Rule-Based Systems (FRBS) is almost endemic. Due to the carefully chosen output membership functions, the inference and the defuzzification methods, a closed form integral can be deducted for the defuzzification method, which ensures the efficiency of the developed Mamdani FRBS. Some important factors, such as the variable length coding scheme and the rule alignment, are also discussed. Experimental results for a real data set from the steel industry suggest that the proposed approach is capable of eliciting not only accurate but also transparent FRBS with good generalization ability

A hierarchical Mamdani-type fuzzy modelling approach with new training data selection and multi-objective optimisation mechanisms: A special application for the prediction of mechanical properties of alloy steels

In this paper, a systematic data-driven fuzzy modelling methodology is proposed, which allows to construct Mamdani fuzzy models considering both accuracy (precision) and transparency (interpretability) of fuzzy systems. The new methodology employs a fast hierarchical clustering algorithm to generate an initial fuzzy model efficiently; a training data selection mechanism is developed to identify appropriate and efficient data as learning samples; a high-performance Particle Swarm Optimisation (PSO) based multi-objective optimisation mechanism is developed to further improve the fuzzy model in terms of both the structure and the parameters; and a new tolerance analysis method is proposed to derive the confidence bands relating to the final elicited models. This proposed modelling approach is evaluated using two benchmark problems and is shown to outperform other modelling approaches. Furthermore, the proposed approach is successfully applied to complex high-dimensional modelling problems for manufacturing of alloy steels, using ‘real’ industrial data. These problems concern the prediction of the mechanical properties of alloy steels by correlating them with the heat treatment process conditions as well as the weight percentages of the chemical compositions

A Multi-Agent Architecture for the Design of Hierarchical Interval Type-2 Beta Fuzzy System

This paper presents a new methodology for building and evolving hierarchical fuzzy systems. For the system design, a tree-based encoding method is adopted to hierarchically link low dimensional fuzzy systems. Such tree structural representation has by nature a flexible design offering more adjustable and modifiable structures. The proposed hierarchical structure employs a type-2 beta fuzzy system to cope with the faced uncertainties, and the resulting system is called the Hierarchical Interval Type-2 Beta Fuzzy System (HT2BFS). For the system optimization, two main tasks of structure learning and parameter tuning are applied. The structure learning phase aims to evolve and learn the structures of a population of HT2BFS in a multiobjective context taking into account the optimization of both the accuracy and the interpretability metrics. The parameter tuning phase is applied to refine and adjust the parameters of the system. To accomplish these two tasks in the most optimal and faster way, we further employ a multi-agent architecture to provide both a distributed and a cooperative management of the optimization tasks. Agents are divided into two different types based on their functions: a structure agent and a parameter agent. The main function of the structure agent is to perform a multi-objective evolutionary structure learning step by means of the Multi-Objective Immune Programming algorithm (MOIP). The parameter agents have the function of managing different hierarchical structures simultaneously to refine their parameters by means of the Hybrid Harmony Search algorithm (HHS). In this architecture, agents use cooperation and communication concepts to create high-performance HT2BFSs. The performance of the proposed system is evaluated by several comparisons with various state of art approaches on noise-free and noisy time series prediction data sets and regression problems. The results clearly demonstrate a great improvement in the accuracy rate, the convergence speed and the number of used rules as compared with other existing approaches

Development of new methodologies for the weight estimation of aircraft structures

The problem of weight estimation in the aerospace industry has been acquiring considerably greater importance in recent years, due to the numerous challenges frequently encountered in the preliminary phases of the design of a new aircraft. This is the stage where it is possible to make design changes without incurring into excessive cost penalties. On the other hand, the knowledge of the design, of the relationships existing between the different variables and their subsequent impact on the final weight of the structure is very limited. As a result, the designer is unable to understand the true effect that individual design decisions will produce on the weight of the structure. In addition to this, new aircraft concepts end up being too conservative, due to the high dependency of current weight estimation methods to historical data and off-the-shelf design solutions. This thesis aims at providing an alternative framework for the weight estimation of aircraft structures at preliminary design stages. By conducting a thorough assessment of current state-of-the-art approaches and tools used in the field, fuzzy logic is presented as an appropriate foundation on which to build an innovative approach to the problem. Different adaptive fuzzy approaches have been used in the development of a methodology which is able to combine an analytical base to the structural design of selected trailing edge components, with substantial knowledge acquisition capabilities for the computation of robust and reliable weight estimates. The final framework allows considerable flexibility in the level of detail of the estimate consistent with the granularity of the input data used. This, combined with an extensive uncertainty analysis through the use of Interval Type-2 fuzzy logic, will provide the designer with the capabilities to understand the impact of error propagation within the model and increase the confidence in the final estimat

Explainable parts-based concept modeling and reasoning

State-of-the-art artificial intelligence (AI) learning algorithms heavily rely on deep learning methods that exploit correlation between inputs and outputs. While effective, these methods typically provide little insight to the reasoning process used by the machine, which makes it difficult for human users to understand the process, trust the decisions made by the system, and control emergent behaviors in the system. One method to fix this is eXplainable AI (XAI), which aims to create algorithms that perform well while also providing explanations to users about the reasoning process to mitigate the problems outlined above. In this thesis, I focus on advancing the research around XAI techniques by introducing systems that provide explanations through the use of partsbased concept modeling and reasoning. Instead of correlating input to output, I correlate input to sub-parts or features of the overall concept being learned by the system. These features are used to model and reason about a concept using an explicitly defined structure. These structures provide explanations to the user by nature of how they are defined. Specifically, I introduce a shallow and deep Adaptive Neuro-Fuzzy Inference System (ANFIS) that can reason in noisy and uncertain contexts. ANFIS provides explanations in the form of learned rules that combine features to determine the overall output concept. I apply this system to real geospatial parts-based reasoning problems and evaluate the performance and explainability of the algorithm. I discover some drawbacks to the ANFIS system as traditionally defined due to dead and diminishing gradients. This leads me to focus on how to model parts-based concepts and their inherent uncertainty in other ways, namely through Spatially Attributed Relation Graphs (SARGs). I incorporate human feedback to refine the machine learning of concepts using SARGs. Finally, I present future directions for research to build on the progress presented in this thesis.Includes bibliographical references

An Incremental Construction of Deep Neuro Fuzzy System for Continual Learning of Non-stationary Data Streams

Existing FNNs are mostly developed under a shallow network configuration having lower generalization power than those of deep structures. This paper proposes a novel self-organizing deep FNN, namely DEVFNN. Fuzzy rules can be automatically extracted from data streams or removed if they play limited role during their lifespan. The structure of the network can be deepened on demand by stacking additional layers using a drift detection method which not only detects the covariate drift, variations of input space, but also accurately identifies the real drift, dynamic changes of both feature space and target space. DEVFNN is developed under the stacked generalization principle via the feature augmentation concept where a recently developed algorithm, namely gClass, drives the hidden layer. It is equipped by an automatic feature selection method which controls activation and deactivation of input attributes to induce varying subsets of input features. A deep network simplification procedure is put forward using the concept of hidden layer merging to prevent uncontrollable growth of dimensionality of input space due to the nature of feature augmentation approach in building a deep network structure. DEVFNN works in the sample-wise fashion and is compatible for data stream applications. The efficacy of DEVFNN has been thoroughly evaluated using seven datasets with non-stationary properties under the prequential test-then-train protocol. It has been compared with four popular continual learning algorithms and its shallow counterpart where DEVFNN demonstrates improvement of classification accuracy. Moreover, it is also shown that the concept drift detection method is an effective tool to control the depth of network structure while the hidden layer merging scenario is capable of simplifying the network complexity of a deep network with negligible compromise of generalization performance.Comment: This paper has been published in IEEE Transactions on Fuzzy System