Heuristic extraction of fuzzy classification rules using data mining techniques: an empirical study on benchmark data sets

We examine the performance of compact fuzzy rule-based classification systems that consist of a small number of simple fuzzy rules with high comprehensibility. Those fuzzy systems are designed in a heuristic manner using rule selection criteria. We first describe fuzzy rule-based classification. Next we describe heuristic rule selection criteria using the terminology in data mining: confidence and support. A small number of fuzzy rules are extracted from numerical data based on each rule selection criterion. Then we examine the classification performance of extracted fuzzy rules through computational experiments on a number of benchmark data sets from the UCI ML Repository. Our results should be viewed as the lowest benchmark performance of fuzzy rule-based classification systems because fuzzy rules are extracted using a simple heuristic method with no optimization or tuning procedures. Nevertheless our results on some data sets are comparable to reported results by the C4.5 algorithm in the literature.