A Genetic-Programming-Based Approach for the Learning of Compact Fuzzy Rule-Based Classification Systems

In the design of an interpretable fuzzy rule-based classification system (FRBCS) the precision as much as the simplicity of the extracted knowledge must be considered as objectives. In any inductive learning algorithm, when we deal with problems with a large number of features, the exponential growth of the fuzzy rule search space makes the learning process more difficult. Moreover it leads to an FRBCS with a rule base with a high cardinality. In this paper, we propose a genetic-programming-based method for the learning of an FRBCS, where disjunctive normal form (DNF) rules compete and cooperate among themselves in order to obtain an understandable and compact set of fuzzy rules, which presents a good classification performance with high dimensionality problems. This proposal uses a token competition mechanism to maintain the diversity of the population. The good results obtained with several classification problems support our proposal.