An architecture of fuzzy neural networks for linguistic processing

Fuzzy sets have been used successfully in order to deal with imprecise data, linguistic terms or not well-defined concepts. Recently, considerable effort has been made in the direction of combining the neural network approach with fuzzy sets. In this paper a fuzzy feed-forward neural network, able to process trapezoidal fuzzy sets, has been investigated. Normalized trapezoidal fuzzy sets have been considered. The fuzzy generalized delta rule with different back-propagation algorithms is discussed. The more interesting and characteristic property of the proposed architecture is the ability of each node to process fuzzy sets or linguistic terms, preserving the simplicity of the back-propagation algorithm. Consequently, the resulting architecture is able to cope with problems in which the input parameters and the desired targets are described by linguistic terms. This methodology has the further interesting characteristic of being able to operate at the linguistic level rather than at the numerical level, that is it can work at a higher data abstraction level. An example in computerized electrocardiography will be illustrated in order to test the proposed approach. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.