Comparative Analysis of Clustering Methods for Fuzzy Classifiers Simplification

Abstract

One problem of fuzzy systems for classification tasks is the exponential growth of rule generation, which translates into excessively long processing times. Different proposals in the literature address this problem through exhaustive rule reduction techniques, which achieve competitive results compared to conventional classifiers by reducing their computational complexity as well. This paper proposes a methodology that is comprised of two stages: 1) a clustering technique that helps identify the structure of an initial low-accurate classifier and 2) a differential evolution parameter identification stage that takes that low-accurate classifier and refines it to obtain a high-accurate classifier. In this way, a comparative analysis among several clustering methods is performed, allowing the users to select a reduced rule set and avoid the use of traditional rule search algorithms. The results show that the Gaussian Mixture Model is the most suitable clustering technique to identify the structure of fuzzy classifiers, since it provides the corresponding fuzzy model with highly competitive classification performance compared to other state-of-the-art methods.