Fuzzy Rule Based Interpolative Reasoning Supported by Attribute Ranking

Using fuzzy rule interpolation (FRI) interpolative reasoning can be effectively performed with a sparse rule base where a given system observation does not match any fuzzy rules. Whilst offering a potentially powerful inference mechanism, in the current literature, typical representation of fuzzy rules in FRI assumes that all attributes in the rules are of equal significance in deriving the consequents. This is a strong assumption in practical applications, thereby often leading to less accurate interpolated results. To address this challenging problem, this work employs feature selection (FS) techniques to adjudge the relative significance of individual attributes and therefore, to differentiate the contributions of the rule antecedents and their impact upon FRI. This is feasible because FS provides a readily adaptable mechanism for evaluating and ranking attributes, being capable of selecting more informative features. Without requiring any acquisition of real observations, based on the originally given sparse rule base, the individual scores are computed using a set of training samples that are artificially created from the rule base through an innovative reverse engineering procedure. The attribute scores are integrated within the popular scale and move transformation-based FRI algorithm (while other FRI approaches may be similarly extended following the same idea), forming a novel method for attribute ranking-supported fuzzy interpolative reasoning. The efficacy and robustness of the proposed approach is verified through systematic experimental examinations in comparison with the original FRI technique, over a range of benchmark classification problems while utilising different FS methods. A specific and important outcome is that supported by attribute ranking, only two (i.e., the least number of) nearest adjacent rules are required to perform accurate interpolative reasoning, avoiding the need of searching for and computing with multiple rules beyond the immediate neighbourhood of a given observationpublishersversionPeer reviewe

Adaptive Fuzzy Interpolation with Prioritized Component Candidates

Adaptive fuzzy interpolation strengthens the potential of fuzzy interpolative reasoning. It first identifies all possible sets of faulty fuzzy reasoning components, termed the candidates, each of which may have led to all the contradictory interpolations. It then tries to modify one selected candidate in an effort to remove all the contradictions and thus restore interpolative consistency. This approach assumes that all the candidates are equally likely to be the real culprit. However, this may not be the case in real situations as certain identified reasoning components may be more liable to resulting in inconsistencies than others. This paper extends the adaptive approach by prioritizing all the generated candidates. This is achieved by exploiting the certainty degrees of fuzzy reasoning components and hence of derived propositions. From this, the candidate with the highest priority is modified first. This extension helps to quickly spot the real culprit and thus considerably improves the approach in terms of efficiency

Rule model simplification

Centre for Intelligent Systems and their ApplicationsDue to its high performance and comprehensibility, fuzzy modelling is becoming more and more popular in dealing with nonlinear, uncertain and complex systems for tasks such as signal processing, medical diagnosis and financial investment. However, there are no principal routine methods to obtain the optimum fuzzy rule base which is not only compact but also retains high prediction (or classification) performance. In order to achieve this, two major problems need to be addressed. First, as the number of input variables increases, the number of possible rules grows exponentially (termed curse of dimensionality). It inevitably deteriorates the transparency of the rule model and can lead to over-fitting, with the model obtaining high performance on the training data but failing to predict the unknown data successfully. Second, gaps may occur in the rule base if the problem is too compact (termed sparse rule base). As a result, it cannot be handled by conventional fuzzy inference such as Mamdani. This Ph.D. work proposes a rule base simplification method and a family of fuzzy interpolation methods to solve the aforementioned two problems. The proposed simplification method reduces the rule base complexity via Retrieving Data from Rules (RDFR). It first retrieves a collection of new data from an original rule base. Then the new data is used for re-training to build a more compact rule model. This method has four advantages: 1) It can simplify rule bases without using the original training data, but is capable of dealing with combinations of rules and data. 2) It can integrate with any rule induction or reduction schemes. 3) It implements the similarity merging and inconsistency removal approaches. 4) It can make use of rule weights. Illustrative examples have been given to demonstrate the potential of this work. The second part of the work concerns the development of a family of transformation based fuzzy interpolation methods (termed HS methods). These methods first introduce the general concept of representative values (RVs), and then use this to interpolate fuzzy rules involving arbitrary polygonal fuzzy sets, by means of scale and move transformations. This family consists of two sub-categories: namely, the original HS methods and the enhanced HS methods. The HS methods not only inherit the common advantages of fuzzy interpolative reasoning -- helping reduce rule base complexity and allowing inferences to be performed within simple and sparse rule bases -- but also have two other advantages compared to the existing fuzzy interpolation methods. Firstly, they provide a degree of freedom to choose various RV definitions to meet different application requirements. Secondly, they can handle the interpolation of multiple rules, with each rule having multiple antecedent variables associated with arbitrary polygonal fuzzy membership functions. This makes the interpolation inference a practical solution for real world applications. The enhanced HS methods are the first proposed interpolation methods which preserve piece-wise linearity, which may provide a solution to solve the interpolation problem in a very high Cartesian space in the mathematics literature. The RDFR-based simplification method has been applied to a variety of applications including nursery prediction, the Saturday morning problem and credit application. HS methods have been utilized in truck backer-upper control and computer hardware prediction. The former demonstrates the simplification potential of the HS methods, while the latter shows their capability in dealing with sparse rule bases. The RDFR-based simplification method and HS methods are further integrated into a novel model simplification framework, which has been applied to a scaled-up application (computer activity prediction). In the experimental studies, the proposed simplification framework leads to very good fuzzy rule base reductions whilst retaining, or improving, performance