HANDLING HIGHLY-DIMENSIONAL CLASSIFICATION TASKS WITH HIERARCHICAL GENETIC FUZZY RULE-BASED CLASSIFIERS

Many modern classification tasks are defined in highly-dimensional feature spaces. The derivation of high-performing genetic fuzzy rule-based classification systems (GFRBCSs) in such scenarios is a non-trivial task. This paper presents a framework for increasing the performance of GFRBCSs by creating a hierarchical fuzzy rule-based classifier. The proposed system is constructed through repeated invocations to a base GFRBCS procedure, considering at each step an input space fuzzy partition of a certain granularity. The best performing rules are inserted in the hierarchical rule base and the process is repeated again, considering a thicker granularity. The employed boosting scheme guides the algorithm in creating new rules to treat uncovered or misclassified patterns, thus monotonically increasing the performance of the classifier. Extensive experimental analysis in a number of real-world high-dimensional classification tasks proves the effectiveness of the proposed approach in increasing the performance of the base classifier, maintaining its interpretability to a considerable degree.