Design of accurate classifiers with a compact fuzzy-rule base using an evolutionary scatter partition of feature space.

Abstract

An evolutionary approach to designing accurate classifiers with a compact fuzzy-rule base using a scatter partition of feature space is proposed, in which all the elements of the fuzzy classifier design problem have been moved in parameters of a complex optimization problem. An intelligent genetic algorithm (IGA) is used to effectively solve the design problem of fuzzy classifiers with many tuning parameters. The merits of the proposed method are threefold: 1) the proposed method has high search ability to efficiently find fuzzy rule-based systems with high fitness values, 2) obtained fuzzy rules have high interpretability, and 3) obtained compact classifiers have high classification accuracy on unseen test patterns. The sensitivity of control parameters of the proposed method is empirically analyzed to show the robustness of the IGA-based method. The performance comparison and statistical analysis of experimental results using ten-fold cross validation show that the IGA-based method without heuristics is efficient in designing accurate and compact fuzzy classifiers using 11 well-known data sets with numerical attribute values.