A proposal for the genetic lateral tuning of linguistic fuzzy systems and its interaction with rule selection

Linguistic fuzzy modeling allows us to deal with the modeling of systems by building a linguistic model which is clearly interpretable by human beings. However, since the accuracy and the interpretability of the obtained model are contradictory properties, the necessity of improving the accuracy of the linguistic model arises when complex systems are modeled. To solve this problem, one of the research lines in recent years has led to the objective of giving more accuracy to linguistic fuzzy modeling without losing the interpretability to a high level. In this paper, a new postprocessing approach is proposed to perform an evolutionary lateral tuning of membership functions, with the main aim of obtaining linguistic models with higher levels of accuracy while maintaining good interpretability. To do so, we consider a new rule representation scheme base on the linguistic 2-tuples representation model which allows the lateral variation of the involved labels. Furthermore, the cooperation of the lateral tuning together with fuzzy rule reduction mechanisms is studied in this paper, presenting results on different real applications. The obtained results show the good performance of the proposed approach in high-dimensional problems and its ability to cooperate with methods to remove unnecessary rules.