Soft-Boosted Self-Constructing Neural Fuzzy Inference Network

Abstract

This correspondence paper proposes an improved version of the self-constructing neural fuzzy inference network (SONFIN), called soft-boosted SONFIN (SB-SONFIN). The design softly boosts the learning process of the SONFIN in order to decrease the error rate and enhance the learning speed. The SB-SONFIN boosts the learning power of the SONFIN by taking into account the numbers of fuzzy rules and initial weights which are two important parameters of the SONFIN, SB-SONFIN advances the learning process by: 1) initializing the weights with the width of the fuzzy sets rather than just with random values and 2) improving the parameter learning rates with the number of learned fuzzy rules. The effectiveness of the proposed soft boosting scheme is validated on several real world and benchmark datasets. The experimental results show that the SB-SONFIN possesses the capability to outperform other known methods on various datasets.