Learning fuzzy classification rules from labeled data

The automatic design of fuzzy rule-based classification systems based on labeled data is considered. It is recognized that both classification performance and interpretability are of major importance and effort is made to keep the resulting rule bases small and comprehensible. For this purpose, an iterative approach for developing fuzzy classifiers is proposed. The initial model is derived from the data and subsequently, feature selection and rule-base simplification are applied to reduce the model, while a genetic algorithm is used for parameter optimization. An application to the Wine data classification problem is shown. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science Inc. All rights reserved.