Adaptive fuzzy rule-based classification systems

This paper proposes an adaptive method to construct a fuzzy rule-based classification system with high performance for pattern classification problems. The proposed method consists of two procedures: an error correction-based learning procedure, and an additional learning procedure. The error correction-based learning procedure adjusts the grade of certainty of each fuzzy rule by its classification performance. That is, when a pattern is misclassified by a particular fuzzy rule, the grade of certainty of that rule is decreased. On the contrary, when a pattern is correctly classified, the grade of certainty is increased. Because the error correction-based learning procedure is not meaningful after all the given patterns are correctly classified, we cannot adjust a classification boundary in such a case. To acquire a more intuitively acceptable boundary, we propose an additional learning procedure. We also propose a method for selecting significant fuzzy rules by pruning unnecessary fuzzy rules, which consists of the error correction-based learning procedure and the concept of forgetting. We can construct a compact fuzzy rule-based classification system with high performance.