Description

Knowledge discovery and data mining have been become very important in our society where the amount of data double almost every year. In these complex databases, much information is often hidden as trends, dependencies and relationships. Data mining is the process of acquiring knowledge, such as behavioral patterns, associations, and significant structures from data, and transforming this information into a compact and interpretable decision system. For complex and high-dimensional classification tasks, data-driven identification of classifiers has to deal with structural problems such as the effective initial partitioning of the input domain and the selection of the relevant features. This thesis focuses on these problems by presenting a new neuro-fuzzy approach for building interpretable fuzzy rules, used for pattern classification and medical diagnosis. The proposed approach combines the merits of the fuzzy logic theory, and neural networks. Fuzzy rules are extracted in three phases: initialization, optimization, and simplification of the fuzzy model. In the first phase, the data set is partitioned automatically into a set of clusters based on input-similarity and output-similarity tests. Membership functions associated with each cluster are defined according to statistical means and variances of the data points. Then, a fuzzy if-then rule is extracted from each cluster to form a fuzzy model. In the second phase, the extracted fuzzy model is used as starting point to construct a network then the fuzzy model parameters are refined, by analyzing the nodes of the network that was trained via the backpropagation gradient descent method. Real-world classification applications usually have many features. This increases the complexity of the classification task. Choosing a subset of the features may increase accuracy and reduce complexity of the knowledge acquisition. In the third phase, feature subset selection by relevance simplification method is used to reduce the extracted fuzzy rules. Finally, ِA number of case studies is applied to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed approach according to the defined evaluation criteria.