A new fingram-based software tool for visual representation and analysis of fuzzy association rules

This paper presents an open source software tool for generation, visual representation and expert analysis of the so-called fuzzy inference-grams (fingrams in short). Fingrams are extended to fuzzy association rules in this work, expanding the scope of this methodology. The tool automatically generates fingrams and displays them to the user for expert analysis. It takes as input a simple configuration file that may be provided by whatever fuzzy modeling tool (it is actually provided by two widely known tools, GUAJE and KEEL). Fingrams graphically represent multi-dimensional fuzzy systems in 2D. The first version of this new software handles three different kinds of fuzzy systems (fuzzy rule-based systems for classification and regression, but also fuzzy association rules). Fingrams illustrate the interaction among fuzzy rules in terms of rule co-firing, i.e., paying attention to pairs of rules fired at the same time by a given input. Their visualization looks like a social network where nodes represent fuzzy rules while edges show the degree of interaction among pairs of rules. Thus, both representation and analysis are supported by social network analysis techniques. The utility of the new software tool is illustrated in a case study on visual representation and analysis of association rules.