A proposal on reasoning methods in fuzzy rule-based classification systems

Fuzzy Rule-Based Systems have been succesfully applied to pattern classification problems. In this type of classification systems, the classical Fuzzy Reasoning Method (FRM) classifies a new example with the consequent of the rule with the greatest degree of association. By using this reasoning method, we lose the information provided by the other rules with different linguistic labels which also represent this value in the pattern attribute, although probably to a lesser degree. The aim of this paper is to present new FRMs which allow us to improve the system performance, maintaining its interpretability. The common aspect of the proposals is the participation, in the classification of the new pattern, of the rules that have been fired by such pattern. We formally describe the behaviour of a general reasoning method, analyze six proposals for this general model, and present a method to learn the parameters of these FRMs by means of Genetic Algorithms, adapting the inference mechanism to the set of rules. Finally, to show the increase of the system generalization capability provided by the proposed FRMs, we point out some results obtained by their integration in a fuzzy rule generation process. (C) 1999 Elsevier Science Inc. All rights reserved.