Linguistic time series forecasting using fuzzy recurrent neural network

It is known that one of the most spread forecasting methods is the time series analysis. A weakness of traditional crisp time series forecasting methods is that they process only measurement based numerical information and cannot deal with the perception-based historical data represented by linguistic values. Application of a new class of time series, a fuzzy time series whose values are linguistic values, can overcome the mentioned weakness of traditional forecasting methods. In this paper we propose a fuzzy recurrent neural network (FRNN) based time series forecasting method for solving forecasting problems in which the data can be presented as perceptions and described by fuzzy numbers. The FRNN allows effectively handle fuzzy time series to apply human expertise throughout the forecasting procedure and demonstrates more adequate forecasting results. Recurrent links in FRNN also allow for simplification of the overall network structure (size) and forecasting procedure. Genetic algorithm-based procedure is used for training the FRNN. The effectiveness of the proposed fuzzy time series forecasting method is tested on the benchmark examples.