Fuzzy Rule-Based Classification Systems for multi-class problems using binary decomposition strategies: On the influence of n-dimensional overlap functions in the Fuzzy Reasoning Method

• Published in: Information sciences Vol. 332; pp. 94 - 114
• Main Authors: Elkano, Mikel, Galar, Mikel, Sanz, Jose, Bustince, Humberto
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Elsevier Inc 01.03.2016
• Subjects: Aggregations; Classification; Decomposition; Decomposition strategies; Fuzzy; Fuzzy logic; Fuzzy Rule-Based Classification Systems; Fuzzy set theory; Mathematical analysis; Mathematical models; Multi-classification; One-vs-One; Overlap functions; Strategy; Multi-classification; One-vs-One; Overlap functions; Fuzzy Rule-Based Classification Systems; Aggregations; Decomposition strategies
• ISSN: 0020-0255; 1872-6291
• DOI: 10.1016/j.ins.2015.11.006

•We study the influence of the usage of n-dimensional overlap functions to model the conjunction in Fuzzy Rule Based Classification Systems (FRBCSs).•We analyze the behavior of these functions when using both decomposition strategies and baseline classifiers.•We consider four well-known FRBCSs (CHI, SLAVE, FURIA, and FARC-HD) and One-vs-All (OVA) and One-vs-One (OVO) strategies.•The benefits obtained from overlap functions strongly depend on the learning process and the rule structure of each algorithm. Multi-class classification problems appear in a broad variety of real-world problems, e.g., medicine, genomics, bioinformatics, or computer vision. In this context, decomposition strategies are useful to increase the classification performance of classifiers. For this reason, in a previous work we proposed to improve the performance of FARC-HD (Fuzzy Association Rule-based Classification model for High-Dimensional problems) fuzzy classifier using One-vs-One (OVO) and One-vs-All (OVA) decomposition strategies. As a result of an exhaustive experimental analysis, we concluded that even though the usage of decomposition strategies was worth to be considered, further improvements could be achieved by introducing n-dimensional overlap functions instead of the product t-norm in the Fuzzy Reasoning Method (FRM). In this way, we can improve confidences for the subsequent processing performed in both OVO and OVA. In this paper, we want to conduct a broader study of the influence of the usage of n-dimensional overlap functions to model the conjunction in several Fuzzy Rule-Based Classification Systems (FRBCSs) in order to enhance their performance in multi-class classification problems applying decomposition techniques. To do so, we adapt the FRM of four well-known FRBCSs (CHI, SLAVE, FURIA, and FARC-HD itself). We will show that the benefits of the usage of n-dimensional overlap functions strongly depend on both the learning algorithm and the rule structure of each classifier, which explains why FARC-HD is the most suitable one for the usage of these functions.