Generating fuzzy rules by learning from examples

A general method is developed for generating fuzzy rules from numerical data. The method consists of five steps: dividing the input and output spaces of the given numerical data into fuzzy regions; generating fuzzy rules from the given data; assigning a degree to each of the generated rules for the purpose of resolving conflicts among the generated rules; creating a combined fuzzy-associative-memory (FAM) bank based on both the generated rules and linguistic rules of human experts; and determining a mapping from input space to output space based on the combined FAM bank using a defuzzifying procedure. The mapping is proved to be capable of approximating any real continuous function on a compact set to arbitrary accuracy. The method is applied to predicting a chaotic time series