ARPOP: An Appetitive Reward-Based Pseudo-Outer-Product Neural Fuzzy Inference System Inspired from the Operant Conditioning of Feeding Behavior in Aplysia

Appetitive operant conditioning in Aplysia for feeding behavior via the electrical stimulation of the esophageal nerve contingently reinforces each spontaneous bite during the feeding process. This results in the acquisition of operant memory by the contingently reinforced animals. Analysis of the cellular and molecular mechanisms of the feeding motor circuitry revealed that activity-dependent neuronal modulation occurs at the interneurons that mediate feeding behaviors. This provides evidence that interneurons are possible loci of plasticity and constitute another mechanism for memory storage in addition to memory storage attributed to activity-dependent synaptic plasticity. In this paper, an associative ambiguity correction-based neuro-fuzzy network, called appetitive reward-based pseudo-outer-product-compositional rule of inference [ARPOP-CRI(S)], is trained based on an appetitive reward-based learning algorithm which is biologically inspired by the appetitive operant conditioning of the feeding behavior in Aplysia. A variant of the Hebbian learning rule called Hebbian concomitant learning is proposed as the building block in the neuro-fuzzy network learning algorithm. The proposed algorithm possesses the distinguishing features of the sequential learning algorithm. In addition, the proposed ARPOP-CRI(S) neuro-fuzzy system encodes fuzzy knowledge in the form of linguistic rules that satisfies the semantic criteria for low-level fuzzy model interpretability. ARPOP-CRI(S) is evaluated and compared against other modeling techniques using benchmark time-series datasets. Experimental results are encouraging and show that ARPOP-CRI(S) is a viable modeling technique for time-variant problem domains.