Derivation of Relational Fuzzy Classification Rules Using Evolutionary Computation

An evolutionary system for derivation of fuzzy classification rules is presented. This system uses two populations: one of fuzzy classification rules, and one of membership function definitions. A constrained-syntax genetic programming evolves the first population and a mutation-based evolutionary algorithm evolves the second population. These two populations co-evolve to better classify the underlying dataset. Unlike other approaches that use fuzzification of continuous attributes of the dataset for discovering fuzzy classification rules, the system presented here fuzzifies the relational operators "greater than" and "less than" using evolutionary methods. For testing our system, the system is applied to the Iris dataset. Our experimental results show that our system outperforms previous evolutionary and non-evolutionary systems on accuracy of classification and derivation of interrelation between the attributes of the Iris dataset. The resulting fuzzy rules of the system can be directly used in knowledge-based systems.