An Automatic Approach for Learning and Tuning Gaussian Interval Type-2 Fuzzy Membership Functions Applied to Lung CAD Classification System

The potential of type-2 fuzzy sets to manage high levels of uncertainty in the subjective knowledge of experts or of numerical information has focused on control and pattern classification systems in recent years. One of the main challenges in designing a type-2 fuzzy logic system (FLS) is how to estimate the parameters of the type-2 fuzzy membership function (T2MF) and the footprint of uncertainty (FOU) from imperfect and noisy datasets. This paper presents an automatic approach to learn and tune Gaussian interval type-2 membership functions (IT2MFs) with application to multidimensional pattern classification problems. T2MFs and their FOUs are tuned according to the uncertainties in the training dataset by a combination of genetic algorithm (GA) and cross-validation techniques. In our GA-based approach, the structure of the chromosome has fewer genes than other GA methods, and chromosome initialization is more precise. The proposed approach addresses the application of the interval type-2 fuzzy logic system (IT2FLS) for the problem of nodule classification in a lung computer-aided detection system. The designed IT2FLS is compared with its type-1 fuzzy logic system (T1FLS) counterpart. The results demonstrate that the IT2FLS outperforms the T1FLS by more than 30% in terms of classification accuracy.