Support vector fuzzy adaptive network in regression analysis

Neural-fuzzy systems have been proved to be very useful and have been applied to modeling many humanistic problems. But these systems also have problems such as those of generalization, dimensionality, and convergence. Support vector machines, which are based on statistical learning theory and kernel transformation, are powerful modeling tools. However, they do not have the ability to represent and to aggregate vague and ill-defined information. In this paper, these two systems are combined. The resulting support vector fuzzy adaptive network (SVFAN) overcomes some of the difficulties of the neural-fuzzy system. To illustrate the proposed approach, a simple nonlinear function is estimated by first generating the training and testing data needed. The results show that the proposed network is a useful modeling tool. c © 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.