A fast genetic method for inducting descriptive fuzzy models

Under certain inference mechanisms, fuzzy rule bases can be regarded as extended additive models. This relationship can be applied to extend some statistical techniques to learn fuzzy models from data. The interest in this parallelism is twofold: theoretical and practical. First, extended additive models can be estimated by means of the matching pursuit algorithm, which has been related to Support Vector Machines, Boosting and Radial Basis neural networks learning; this connection can be exploited to better understand the learning of fuzzy models. In particular, the technique we propose here can be regarded as the counterpart to boosting fuzzy classifiers in the field of fuzzy modeling. Second, since matching pursuit is very efficient in time, we can expect to obtain faster algorithms to learn fuzzy rules from data. We show that the combination of a genetic algorithm and the backfitting process learns faster than ad hoc methods in certain datasets.