Among the computational intelligence techniques employed to solve classification problems, the fuzzy rule-based classification system (FRBCS) is a popular tool capable of building a linguistic model interpretable to users. However, it may face lack of accuracy in some complex applications, by the fact that the inflexibility of the concept of the linguistic variable imposes hard restrictions on the fuzzy rule structure. In this paper, we extend the fuzzy rule in FRBCS with a belief rule structure and develop a belief rule-based classification system (BRBCS) to address imprecise or incomplete information in complex classification problems. The two components of the proposed BRBCS, i.e., the belief rule base (BRB) and the belief reasoning method (BRM), are designed specifically by taking into account the pattern noise that existes in many real-world data sets. Four experiments based on benchmark data sets are carried out to evaluate the classification accuracy, robustness, interpretability and time complexity of the proposed method.
In some real-world classification applications, such as target recognition, both training data collected by sensors and expert knowledge may be available. These two types of information are usually independent and complementary, and both are useful for classification. In this paper, a hybrid belief rule-based classification system (HBRBCS) is developed to make joint use of these two types of information. The belief rule structure, which is capable of capturing fuzzy, imprecise, and incomplete causal relationships, is used as the common representation model. With the belief rule structure, a data-driven belief rule base (DBRB) and a knowledge-driven belief rule base (KBRB) are learnt from uncertain training data and expert knowledge, respectively. A fusion algorithm is proposed to combine the DBRB and KBRB to obtain an optimal hybrid belief rule base (HBRB). A belief reasoning & decision making module is then developed to classify a query pattern based on the generated HBRB. An airborne target classification problem in the air surveillance system is studied to demonstrate the performance of the proposed HBRBCS for combining both uncertain sensor measurements and expert knowledge to make classification.
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