Fuzzy knowledge-based prediction through weighted rule interpolation

Fuzzy rule interpolation (FRI) facilitates approximate reasoning in fuzzy rule-based systems only with sparse knowledge available, remedying the limitation of conventional compositional rule of inference working with a dense rule base. Most of the existing FRI work assumes equal significance of the conditional attributes in the rules while performing interpolation. Recently, interesting techniques have been reported for achieving weighted interpolative reasoning. However, they are either particularly tailored to perform classification problems only or employ attribute weights that are obtained using additional information (rather than just the given rules), without integrating them with the associated FRI procedure. This paper presents a weighted rule interpolation scheme for performing prediction tasks by the use of fuzzy sparse knowledge only. The weights of rule conditional attributes are learned from a given rule base to discriminate the relative significance of each individual attribute and are integrated throughout the internal mechanism of the FRI process. This scheme is demonstrated using the popular scale and move transformation-based FRI for resolving prediction problems, systematically evaluated on 12 benchmark prediction tasks. The performance is compared with the relevant state-of-the-art FRI techniques, showing the efficacy of the proposed approach