A Compact Belief Rule-Based Classifier with Interval-Constrained Clustering

In this paper, a rule learning method based on interval-constrained clustering is proposed to efficiently design a compact belief rule-based classifier. The main idea of this method is to learn a compact belief rule base based on a set of prototypes generated from the original training set. First, an interval-constrained clustering algorithm is used to divide the training data for each class into several clusters, with which the number of data belonging to each cluster can be constrained within a given interval. Then, we define a belief rule based on the centroid of each cluster. Finally, a two-objective optimization procedure is designed to get a compact belief rule base with a better trade-off between accuracy and interpretability. Two experiments based on synthetic and benchmark data sets have been carried out to evaluate the performance of the proposed classifier.