On the influence of using fuzzy extensions in linguistic fuzzy rule-based regression systems

Fuzzy Rule-Based Systems, FRBSs, are powerful tools to address regression problems. They can model the relationship between inputs and outputs by linguistic concepts. However, those FRBSs which are based on the conventional Type-1 fuzzy sets may not be able to handle some difficulties of real-world applications. In such situations, using novel representations of fuzzy sets seems like a good idea. Different extensions of fuzzy sets usually help to provide more precise models in the real-world problems. In this study, the influence of using fuzzy extensions in improving the efficiency of linguistic fuzzy rule-based regression models is investigated. For this purpose, a conventional Type-1 Mamdani FRBS is adapted to the three extensions of fuzzy sets, namely Interval Type-2, Intuitionistic, and Interval Type-2 Intuitionistic fuzzy sets. A two-pass method is proposed to define membership (non-membership) functions of these fuzzy sets; this method is based on the 3-tuples representation of the standard Type-1 membership functions. Wang and Mendel's rule learning method is adapted to extract fuzzy rules from regression data. In order to tune the membership functions up to different extents, three evolutionary extensions are also presented for each type of the proposed FRBSs. Individual, internal, and external comparisons of the proposed FRBSs were done using 22 real-world regression datasets and statistical tests. Experimental results confirm that all the three proposed FRBSs outperform the classical Type-1 framework; furthermore, the Interval Type-2 Intuitionistic FRBS is the superior system so that an appropriate tuning of its parameters makes it the most accurate model. (C) 2019 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.