Interval-valued fuzzy decision trees with optimal neighbourhood perimeter

This research proposes a new model for constructing decision trees using interval-valued fuzzy membership values. Most existing fuzzy decision trees do not consider the uncertainty associated with their membership values, however, precise values of fuzzy membership values are not always possible. In this paper, we represent fuzzy membership values as intervals to model uncertainty and employ the look-ahead based fuzzy decision tree induction method to construct decision trees. We also investigate the significance of different neighbourhood values and define a new parameter insensitive to specific data sets using fuzzy sets. Some examples are provided to demonstrate the effectiveness of the approach

Fuzzy Decision Support Applied to Machine Maintenance

This research work focuses on the optimal algorithms of decision making and forecasting respectively, in order to achieve a better prediction. Decision making techniques and forecasting methods are investigated due to the poor accuracy of forecasting in comparison with real world data. The uncertainty of real world data leads to the use of type-1 fuzzy sets, type-2 fuzzy sets, fuzzy decision tree and fuzzy time-series for fuzzy data-mining - to which they are applied for the look-ahead based interval-valued fuzzy decision tree with optimal perimeter of the neighbourhood (LAIVFDT-OPN) model, and high-order type-2 fuzzy time series (HO-T2FTS) model. In the experiment with a real world business, a ‘computerised maintenance integration management system’ (CMIMS) is constructed as a simulation model for a case study. The CMIMS model consists of the LAIVFDT-OPN and HO-T2FTS models. It is also applied to a set of real world data from a factory in Thailand. Due to the significant uncertainty involved in machine maintenance, most tasks in machine diagnosis are still carried out manually by technicians. In this research, a prototype of CMIMS employing fuzzy data mining to diagnose machine maintenance is constructed. Considering the special features of machine maintenance data, fuzzy decision trees and fuzzy time series are adopted in the proposal method. To represent the uncertain fuzzy memberships, interval-valued fuzzy decision trees are proposed and an optimal neighbourhood perimeter is defined for look-ahead fuzzy decision trees. Based on the existing first-order type-2 time-series and high-order type-1 fuzzy time series, an improved high-order type-2 fuzzy time series method is put forward. In this case study, the CMIMS model can be used to analyse and evaluate uncertain data. It also can be employed to facilitate decision making in machine equipment status, and forecast machine maintenance plan in the future in stead of technicians. Our results demonstrated that the proposal method is effective in fuzzy decision support for machine maintenance

Path Planning Based on Fuzzy Decision Trees and Potential Field

The fuzzy logic algorithm is an artificial intelligence algorithm that uses mathematical logic to solve to by the data value inputs which are not precise in order to reach an accurate conclusion. In this work, Fuzzy decision tree (FDT) has been designed to solve the path planning problem by considering all available information and make the most appropriate decision given by the inputs. The FDT is often used to make a path planning decision in graph theory. It has been applied in the previous researches in the field of robotics, but it still shows drawbacks in that the robot will stop at the local minima and is not able to find the shortest path. Hence, this paper combines the FDT algorithm with the potential field algorithm. The potential field algorithm provides weight to the FDT algorithm which enables the robot to successfully avoid the local minima and find the shortest path

Granular computing based approach of rule learning for binary classification

Rule learning is one of the most popular types of machine-learning approaches, which typically follow two main strategies: ‘divide and conquer’ and ‘separate and conquer’. The former strategy is aimed at induction of rules in the form of a decision tree, whereas the latter one is aimed at direct induction of if–then rules. Due to the case that the divide and conquer strategy could result in the replicated sub-tree problem, which not only leads to overfitting but also increases the computational complexity in classifying unseen instances, researchers have thus been motivated to develop rule learning approaches through the separate and conquer strategy. In this paper, we focus on investigation of the Prism algorithm, since it is a representative one that follows the separate and conquer strategy, and is aimed at learning a set of rules for each class in the setting of granular computing, where each class (referred to as target class) is viewed as a granule. The Prism algorithm shows highly comparable performance to the most popular algorithms, such as ID3 and C4.5, which follow the divide and conquer strategy. However, due to the need to learn a rule set for each class, Prism usually produces very complex rule-based classifiers. In real applications, there are many problems that involve one target class only, so it is not necessary to learn a rule set for each class, i.e., only a set of rules for the target class needs to be learned and a default rule is used to indicate the case of non-target classes. To address the above issues of Prism, we propose a new version of the algorithm referred to as PrismSTC, where ‘STC’ stands for ‘single target class’. Our experimental results show that PrismSTC leads to production of simpler rule-based classifiers without loss of accuracy in comparison with Prism. PrismSTC also demonstrates sufficiently good performance comparing with C4.5

J-measure based pruning for advancing classification performance of information entropy based rule generation

Learning of classification rules is a popular approach of machine learning, which can be achieved through two strategies, namely divide-and-conquer and separate-and-conquer. The former is aimed at generating rules in the form of a decision tree, whereas the latter generates if-then rules directly from training data. From this point of view, the above two strategies are referred to as decision tree learning and rule learning, respectively. Both learning strategies can lead to production of complex rule based classifiers that overfit training data, which has motivated researchers to develop pruning algorithms towards reduction of overfitting. In this paper, we propose a J-measure based pruning algorithm, which is referred to as Jmean-pruning. The proposed pruning algorithm is used to advance the performance of the information entropy based rule generation method that follows the separate and conquer strategy. An experimental study is reported to show how Jmean-pruning can effectively help the above rule learning method avoid overfitting. The results show that the use of Jmean-pruning achieves to advance the performance of the rule learning method and the improved performance is very comparable or even considerably better than the one of C4.5

Fuzzy C-ordered medoids clustering of interval-valued data

Fuzzy clustering for interval-valued data helps us to find natural vague boundaries in such data. The Fuzzy c-Medoids Clustering (FcMdC) method is one of the most popular clustering methods based on a partitioning around medoids approach. However, one of the greatest disadvantages of this method is its sensitivity to the presence of outliers in data. This paper introduces a new robust fuzzy clustering method named Fuzzy c-Ordered-Medoids clustering for interval-valued data (FcOMdC-ID). The Huber's M-estimators and the Yager's Ordered Weighted Averaging (OWA) operators are used in the method proposed to make it robust to outliers. The described algorithm is compared with the fuzzy c-medoids method in the experiments performed on synthetic data with different types of outliers. A real application of the FcOMdC-ID is also provided