Classification Rule Mining with Iterated Greedy

In the context of data mining, classi cation rule discovering is the task of designing accurate rule based systems that model the useful knowledge that di erentiate some data classes from others, and is present in large data sets. Iterated greedy search is a powerful metaheuristic, successfully applied to di erent optimisation problems, which to our knowledge, has not previously been used for classi cation rule mining. In this work, we analyse the convenience of using iterated greedy algorithms for the design of rule classi cation systems. We present and study di erent alternatives and compare the results with state-of-the-art methodologies from the literature. The results show that iterated greedy search may generate accurate rule classi cation systems with acceptable interpretability level

Hierarchical Fuzzy Systems: Interpretability and Complexity

Hierarchical fuzzy systems (HFSs) have been regarded as a useful solution for overcoming the major issues in fuzzy logic systems (FLSs), i.e., rule explosion due to the increase in the number of input variables. In HFS, the standard FLS are reformed into a low-dimensional FLS subsystem network. Moreover, the rules in HFS usually have antecedents with fewer variables than the rules in standard FLS with equivalent functions, because the number of input variables in each subsystem is less. Consequently, HFSs manage to decrease rule explosion, which minimises complexity and improves model interpretability. Nevertheless, the issues related to the question of “Does the complexity reduction of HFSs that have multiple subsystems, layers and different topologies really improve their interpretability?” are not clear and persist. In this paper, a comparison focusing on interpretability and complexity is made between two HFS’ topologies: parallel and serial. A detailed measurement of the interpretability and complexity with different configurations for both topologies is provided. This comparative study aims to examine the correlation between interpretability and complexity in HFS

Optimization of fuzzy rule sets using a bacterial evolutionary algorithm

In this paper we present a novel approach where we rst create a large set of (possibly) redundant rules using inductive rule learning and where we use a bacterial evolutionary algorithm to identify the best subset of rules in a subsequent step. This enables us to nd an optimal rule set with respect to a freely de nable global goal function, which gives us the possibility to integrate interpretability related quality criteria explicitly in the goal function and to consider the interplay of the overlapping fuzzy rulesPeer Reviewe

THE REAL-WORLD-SEMANTICS INTERPRETABILITY OF LINGUISTIC RULE BASES AND THE APPROXIMATE REASONING METHOD OF FUZZY SYSTEMS

The real-world-semantics interpretability concept of fuzzy systems introduced in [1] is new for the both methodology and application and is necessary to meet the demand of establishing a mathematical basis to construct computational semantics of linguistic words so that a method developed based on handling the computational semantics of linguistic terms to simulate a human method immediately handling words can produce outputs similar to the one produced by the human method. As the real world of each application problem having its own structure which is described by certain linguistic expressions, this requirement can be ensured by imposing constraints on the interpretation assigning computational objects in the appropriate computational structure to the words so that the relationships between the computational semantics in the computational structure is the image of relationships between the real-world objects described by the word-expressions. This study will discuss more clearly the concept of real-world-semantics interpretability and point out that such requirement is a challenge to the study of the interpretability of fuzzy systems, especially for approaches within the fuzzy set framework. A methodological challenge is that it requires both the computational expression representing a given linguistic fuzzy rule base and an approximate reasoning method working on this computation expression must also preserve the real-world semantics of the application problem. Fortunately, the hedge algebra (HA) based approach demonstrates the expectation that the graphical representation of the rule of fuzzy systems and the interpolation reasoning method on them are able to preserve the real-world semantics of the real-world counterpart of the given application problem

An interpretable artificial intelligence based smart agriculture system

With increasing world population the demand of food production has increased exponentially. Internet of Things (IoT) based smart agriculture system can play a vital role in optimising crop yield by managing crop requirements in real-time. Interpretability can be an important factor to make such systems trusted and easily adopted by farmers. In this paper, we propose a novel artificial intelligence-based agriculture system that uses IoT data to monitor the environment and alerts farmers to take the required actions for maintaining ideal conditions for crop production. The strength of the proposed system is in its interpretability which makes it easy for farmers to understand, trust and use it. The use of fuzzy logic makes the system customisable in terms of types/number of sensors, type of crop, and adaptable for any soil types and weather conditions. The proposed system can identify anomalous data due to security breaches or hardware malfunction using machine learning algorithms. To ensure the viability of the system we have conducted thorough research related to agricultural factors such as soil type, soil moisture, soil temperature, plant life cycle, irrigation requirement and water application timing for Maize as our target crop. The experimental results show that our proposed system is interpretable, can detect anomalous data, and triggers actions accurately based on crop requirements

An evolving feature weighting framework for radial basis function neural network models

Via Granular Computing (GrC), one can create effective computational frameworks for obtaining information from data, motivated by the human perception of combining similar objects. Combining knowledge gained via GrC with a Fuzzy inference engine (Neural-Fuzzy) enable us to develop a transparent system. While weighting variables based on their importance during the iterative data granulation process has been proposed before (W-GrC), there is no work in the literature to demonstrate effectiveness and impact on Type-2 Fuzzy Logic systems (T2-FLS). The main contribution of this paper is to extend W-GrC, for the first time, to both Type-1 and Type-2 models known as Radial Basis Function Neural Network (RBFNN) and General Type-2 Radial Basis Function Neural Network (GT2-RBFNN). The proposed framework is validated using popular datasets: Iris, Wine, Breast Cancer, Heart and Cardiotocography. Results show that with the appropriate selection of feature weight parameter, the new computational framework achieves better classification accuracy outcomes. In addition, we also introduce in this research work an investigation on the modelling structure's interpretability (via Nauck's index) where it is shown that a good balance of interpretability and accuracy can be maintained

Low-level interpretability and high-level interpretability: a unified view of data-driven interpretable fuzzy system modelling

This paper aims at providing an in-depth overview of designing interpretable fuzzy inference models from data within a unified framework. The objective of complex system modelling is to develop reliable and understandable models for human being to get insights into complex real-world systems whose first-principle models are unknown. Because system behaviour can be described naturally as a series of linguistic rules, data-driven fuzzy modelling becomes an attractive and widely used paradigm for this purpose. However, fuzzy models constructed from data by adaptive learning algorithms usually suffer from the loss of model interpretability. Model accuracy and interpretability are two conflicting objectives, so interpretation preservation during adaptation in data-driven fuzzy system modelling is a challenging task, which has received much attention in fuzzy system modelling community. In order to clearly discriminate the different roles of fuzzy sets, input variables, and other components in achieving an interpretable fuzzy model, a taxonomy of fuzzy model interpretability is first proposed in terms of low-level interpretability and high-level interpretability in this paper. The low-level interpretability of fuzzy models refers to fuzzy model interpretability achieved by optimizing the membership functions in terms of semantic criteria on fuzzy set level, while the high-level interpretability refers to fuzzy model interpretability obtained by dealing with the coverage, completeness, and consistency of the rules in terms of the criteria on fuzzy rule level. Some criteria for low-level interpretability and high-level interpretability are identified, respectively. Different data-driven fuzzy modelling techniques in the literature focusing on the interpretability issues are reviewed and discussed from the perspective of low-level interpretability and high-level interpretability. Furthermore, some open problems about interpretable fuzzy models are identified and some potential new research directions on fuzzy model interpretability are also suggested. Crown Copyright © 2008