Fuzzy-membership-based labeling: a new labeling method for both classification task and regression task

Abstract

In the machine learning and deep learning field, there are two main kinds of tasks: classification and regression. The label for the former is discrete, while for the latter is continuous. Due to the big gaps in labels, these two tasks are generally re solved separately, bringing low training efficiency and waste of computing resources. To this end, this paper proposes a new labeling method based on fuzzy membership. The main idea is to build an intermediate variable, which behaves between continuous and discrete variables. Then, the relation between the intermediate variable and the discrete label can be identified with fuzzy membership. Finally, the fuzzy membership is adopted for building labels to train the source model. After training, the source model can be transferred to achieve both classification and regression tasks. To validate the new labeling method, two typical tasks in the PHM field, aging stage classification and RUL prediction, are selected as the representative for classification and regression tasks, respectively. Furthermore, LSTM with two dense layers is chosen as the benchmark source model. With the C-MAPSS dataset, the superiority of the proposed fuzzy-membership based labeling to improve the network’s task transfer learning performance has been verified.