A greedy belief rule base generation and learning method for classification problem

Abstract Among many rule-based systems employed in classification problems, the belief rule-based (BRB) system has been significant for its ability to deal with both quantitative and qualitative information under uncertainty. However, it may face excessive information and low accuracy in some applications due to the limitations of the conventional BRB generation method. To this end, a greedy-based BRB learning method is proposed in this paper. Firstly, the BRB is generated by selecting a reduced number of belief rules from a set of candidate rules. Then, the BRB learning process is conducted by exploiting a selection and reduction strategy, which searches and selects the optimal rules from candidate rules as well as removes noise and redundant rules. Moreover, the original procedures of the inference process and class estimation are retained from conventional BRB systems. Thirty standard classification benchmarks are tested to validate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed method, and the classification results are compared with existing rule-based systems, novel belief rule-based systems, and conventional machine learning methods. The comparison results show that the proposed method could achieve relatively satisfactory accuracy while having a significantly smaller BRB. Furthermore, the results derived from benchmarks with two or three classes show the superior performance of the proposed method compared with some state-of-the-art classification methods.