ID3-derived fuzzy rules and optimized defuzzification for handwritten numeral recognition

Presents a technique to produce fuzzy rules based on the ID3 approach and to optimize defuzzification parameters by using a two-layer perceptron. The technique overcomes the difficulties in a conventional syntactic approach to handwritten character recognition, including problems of choosing a starting or reference point, scaling, and learning by machines. The authors' technique provides: a way to produce meaningful and simple fuzzy rules; a method to fuzzify ID3-derived rules to deal with uncertain, noisy, or fuzzy data; and a framework to incorporate fuzzy rules learned from the training data and those extracted from human recognition experience. The authors' experimental results on NIST Special Database 3 show that the technique out-performs the straight forward ID3 approach. Moreover, ID3-derived fuzzy rules can be combined with an optimized nearest neighbor classifier, which uses intensity features only, to achieve a better classification performance than either of the classifiers. The combined classifier achieves a correct classification rate of 98.6% on the test set.