Generating single granularity-based fuzzy classification rules for multiobjective genetic fuzzy rule selection

Abstract

Recently, multiobjective evolutionary algorithms have been applied to improve the difficult tradeoff between interpretability and accuracy of fuzzy rule-based systems. It is known that both requirements are usually contradictory, however, these kinds of algorithms can obtain a set of solutions with different trade-offs. The application of multiobjective evolutionary algorithms to fuzzy rule-based systems is often referred to as multiobjective genetic fuzzy systems. The first study on multiobjective genetic fuzzy systems was multiobjective genetic fuzzy rule selection in order to simultaneously achieve accuracy maximization and complexity minimization. This approach is based on the generation of a set of candidate fuzzy classification rules by considering a previously fixed granularity or multiple fuzzy partitions with different granularities for each attribute. Then, a multiobjective evolutionary optimization algorithm is applied to perform fuzzy rule selection. Although the multiple granularity approach is one of the most promising approaches, its interpretability loss has often been pointed out. In this work, we propose a mechanism to generate single granularity-based fuzzy classification rules for multiobjective genetic fuzzy rule selection. This mechanism is able to specify appropriate single granularities for fuzzy rule extraction before performing multiobjective genetic fuzzy rule selection. The results show that the performance of the obtained classifiers can be even improved by avoiding multiple granularities, which increases the linguistic interpretability of the obtained models.