Granular Computing for Machine Learning: Pursuing New Development Horizons

Undoubtedly, machine learning (ML) has demonstrated a wealth of far-reaching successes present both at the level of fundamental developments, design methodologies and numerous application areas, quite often encountered in domains requiring a high level of autonomous behavior. Over the passage of time, there are growing challenges of privacy and security, interpretability, explainability, confidence (credibility), and computational sustainability, among others. In this study, we advocate that these quests could be addressed by casting them both conceptually and algorithmically in the unified environment augmented by the principles of granular computing. It is demonstrated that the level of abstraction, delivered by granular computing plays a pivotal role in the interpretation by quantifying the level of credibility of ML constructs. The study also highlights the principles of granular computing and elaborates on its landscape. The original idea of a comprehensive and unified framework of data-knowledge environment of ML is introduced along with a detailed discussion on how data and knowledge are used in a seamless fashion by invoking granular embedding and producing relevant loss functions. Key categories of knowledge-data integration realized at the levels of data and model (involving symbolic/qualitative models and physics-oriented models) and investigated.