Comparison of the Michigan and Pittsburgh approaches to the design of fuzzy classification systems

Abstract

Fuzzy systems based on fuzzy if-then rules have been applied to various problems. The main application area has been fuzzy control problems. In many cases, such fuzzy systems can handle only a few input variables. This is because the number of fuzzy if-then rules exponentially increases as the number of input variables increases. In this paper, we try to design fuzzy classification systems based on fuzzy if-then rules for multidimensional pattern classification problems with many attributes. For designing such fuzzy classification systems, we compare two frameworks in the area of genetics-based machine learning: the Michigan approach and the Pittsburgh approach. The performance of fuzzy rule-based classification systems is also compared with that of various pattern classification methods. In computer simulations, we use a wine classification problem with 13 attributes, a cancer diagnosis problem with 9 attributes, and a credit approval problem with 14 attributes. © 1997 Scripta Technica, Inc. Electron Comm Jpn Pt 3, 80(12): 10–19, 1997