Simultaneous Structure Identification and Fuzzy Rule Generation for Takagi–Sugeno Models

One of the main attractions of a fuzzy rule-based system is its interpretability which is hindered severely with an increase in the dimensionality of the data. For high-dimensional data, the identification of fuzzy rules also possesses a big challenge. Feature selection methods often ignore the subtle nonlinear interaction that the features and the learning system can have. To address this problem of structure identification, we propose an integrated method that can find the bad features simultaneously when finding the rules from data for Takagi–Sugeno-type fuzzy systems. It is an integrated learning mechanism that can take into account the nonlinear interactions that may be present between features and between features and fuzzy rule-based systems. Hence, it can pick up a small set of useful features and generate useful rules for the problem at hand. Such an approach is computationally very attractive because it is not iterative in nature like the forward or backward selection approaches. The effectiveness of the proposed approach is demonstrated on four function-approximation-type well-studied problems.