Rule model simplification

Due to its high performance and comprehensibility, fuzzy modelling is becoming more and more popular in dealing with nonlinear, uncertain and complex systems for tasks such as signal processing, medical diagnosis and financial investment. However, there are no principal routine methods to obtain the optimum fuzzy rule base which is not only compact but also retains high prediction (or classification) performance. In order to achieve this, two major problems need to be addressed. First, as the number of input variables increases, the number of possible rules grows exponentially (termed curse of dimensionality). It inevitably deteriorates the transparency of the rule model and can lead to over-fitting, with the model obtaining high performance on the training data but failing to predict the unknown data successfully. Second, gaps may occur in the rule base if the problem is too compact (termed sparse rule base). As a result, it cannot be handled by conventional fuzzy inference such as Mamdani. This Ph.D. work proposes a rule base simplification method and a family of fuzzy interpolation methods to solve the aforementioned two problems. The proposed simplification method reduces the rule base complexity via Retrieving Data from Rules (RDFR). It first retrieves a collection of new data from an original rule base. Then the new data is used for re-training to build a more compact rule model. This method has four advantages: 1) It can simplify rule bases without using the original training data, but is capable of dealing with combinations of rules and data. 2) It can integrate with any rule induction or reduction schemes. 3) It implements the similarity merging and inconsistency removal approaches. 4) It can make use of rule weights. Illustrative examples have been given to demonstrate the potential of this work. The second part of the work concerns the development of a family of transformation based fuzzy interpolation methods (termed HS methods). These methods first introduce the general concept of representative values (RVs), and then use this to interpolate fuzzy rules involving arbitrary polygonal fuzzy sets, by means of scale and move transformations. This family consists of two sub-categories: namely, the original HS methods and the enhanced HS methods. The HS methods not only inherit the common advantages of fuzzy interpolative reasoning – helping reduce rule base complexity and allowing inferences to be performed within simple and sparse rule bases –