Context adaptation of mamdani fuzzy rule based systems

Context adaptation is certainly a promising approach in the development of fuzzy rule based systems (FRBSs). First, an initial rule base is extracted from heuristic knowledge of the application domain. Meanings of linguistic terms are defined so as to guarantee high interpretability of the FRBSs. Then, meanings are adapted to a specific context through the use of operators that, using a set of known input–output patterns, appropriately modify the corresponding fuzzy sets. The choice of the specific operators and their parameters is context based and optimized so as to obtain a good interpretability–accuracy trade‐off. In this paper, we propose a set of operators that, starting from a given FRBS, adapt the FRBS to the specific context by adjusting the universes of the input and output variables, and modifying the core, the support and the shape of the fuzzy sets which compose the partitions of these universes. The operators are defined so as to preserve ordering of the linguistic terms, universality of rules, and interpretability of partitions. The choice of the parameters used in the operators is performed by a genetic optimization process aimed at maximizing the accuracy and preserving the interpretability of the FRBS. We finally describe the application of our context adaptation approach to two Mamdani fuzzy systems developed, respectively, for two different domains, namely, regression and data modeling. © 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.