Parallel learning of large fuzzy cognitive maps

Fuzzy Cognitive Maps (FCMs) are a class of discrete-time Artificial Neural Networks that are used to model dynamic systems. A recently introduced supervised learning method, which is based on real-coded genetic algorithm (RCGA), allows learning high-quality FCMs from historical data. The current bottleneck of this learning method is its scalabitity, which originates from large continuous search space (of quadratic size with respect to the size of the FCM) and computational complexity of genetic optimization. To this end, the goal of this paper is to explore parallel nature of genetic algorithms to alleviate the scalability problem. We use the global single-population master-slave parallelization method to speed up the FCMs learning method. We investigate the influence of different hardware architectures on the computational time of the learning method by executing a wide range of synthetic and real-life benchmarking tests. We analyze the quality of the proposed parallel learning method in application to both dense and sparse large FCNU, i.e. maps that consist of several dozens of concepts. The parallelization is shown to provide substantial speed-ups, allowing doubting the size of the FCM that can be learned by parallelization with 8 processors.