HILK: A new methodology for designing highly interpretable linguistic knowledge bases using the fuzzy logic formalism

This work describes a new methodology for making easier the design process of interpretable knowledge bases. It considers both expert knowledge and knowledge extracted from data. The combination of both kinds of knowledge is likely to yield robust compact systems with a good trade‐off between accuracy and interpretability. Fuzzy logic offers an integration framework where both types of knowledge are represented using the same formalism. However, as two knowledge bases may convey contradictions and/or redundancies, the integration process must be made carefully. Results obtained, in four well‐known benchmark classification problems, show that our methodology leads to highly interpretable knowledge bases with a good accuracy, comparable to that achieved by other methodologies. © 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.