A Deep Learning Inspired Belief Rule-Based Expert System

Abstract

Recent technological advancements in the area of the Internet of Things (IoT) and cloud services, enable the generation of large amounts of raw data. However, the accurate prediction by using this data is considered as challenging for machine learning methods. Deep Learning (DL) methods are widely used to process large amounts of data because they need less preprocessing than traditional machine learning methods. Various types of uncertainty associated with large amounts of raw data hinder the prediction accuracy. Belief Rule-Based Expert Systems (BRBES) are widely used to handle uncertain data. However, due to their incapability of integrating associative memory within the inference procedures, they demonstrate poor accuracy of prediction when large amounts of data is considered. Therefore, we propose the integration of an associative memory based DL method within the BRBES inference procedures, allowing to discover accurate data patterns and hence, the improvement of prediction under uncertainty. To demonstrate the applicability of the proposed method, which is named BRB-DL, it has been fine tuned against two datasets, one in the area of air pollution and the other in the area of power generation. The reliability of the proposed BRB-DL method, has also been compared with other DL methods such as Long-Short Term Memory and Deep Neural Network, and BRBES by taking into account of the air quality dataset from Beijing city and the power generation dataset of a combined cycle power plant. BRB-DL outperforms the above-mentioned methods in terms of prediction accuracy. For example, the Mean Square Error value of BRB-DL is 4.12 whereas for Long-Short Term Memory, Deep Neural Network, Fuzzy Deep Neural Network, Adaptive Neuro Fuzzy Inference System and BRBES it is 18.66, 28.49, 17.05, 16.37 and 38.15 for combined cycle power plant respectively, which are significantly higher.