Fuzzy nonparametric regression based on local linear smoothing technique

In a great deal of literature on fuzzy regression analysis, most of research has focused on some predefined parametric forms of fuzzy regression relationships, especially on the fuzzy linear regression models. In many practical situations, it may be unrealistic to predetermine a fuzzy parametric regression relationship. In this paper, a fuzzy nonparametric model with crisp input and LR fuzzy output is considered and, based on the distance measure for fuzzy numbers suggested by Diamond [P. Diamond, Fuzzy least squares, Information Sciences 46 (1988) 141–157], the local linear smoothing technique in statistics with the cross-validation procedure for selecting the optimal value of the smoothing parameter is fuzzified to fit this model. Some simulation experiments are conducted to examine the performance of the proposed method and three real-world datasets are analyzed to illustrate the application of the proposed method. The results demonstrate that the proposed method works quite well not only in producing satisfactory estimate of the fuzzy regression function, but also in reducing the boundary effect significantly. 2007 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.