Multi-attribute search framework for optimizing extended belief rule-based systems

The advantages and applications of rule-based systems have caused them to be widely recognized as one of the most popular systems in human decision-making, due to their accuracy and efficiency. To improve the performance of rule-based systems, there are several issues proposed to be focused. First, it is unnecessary to take the entire rule base into consideration during each decision-making process. Second, there is no need to visit the entire rule base to search for the key rules. Last, the key rules for each decision-making process should be different. This paper focuses on an advanced extended belief rule base (EBRB) system and proposes a multi-attribute search framework (MaSF) to reconstruct the relationship between rules in the EBRB to form the MaSF-based EBRB. MaSFs can be divided into k-dimensional tree (KDT)-based MaSFs and Burkhard–Keller (BKT)-based MaSFs. The former is targeted at decision-making problems with small-scale attribute datasets, while the latter is for those with large-scale attribute datasets. Based on the MaSF-based EBRB, the k-neighbor search and the best activated rule set algorithms are further proposed to find both the unique and the desired rules for each decision-making process without visiting the entire EBRB, especially when handling classification problems with large attribute datasets. Two sets of experiments based on benchmark datasets with different numbers of attributes are performed to analyze the difference between KDT-based MaSFs and BKT-based MaSFs, and to demonstrate how to use MaSFs to improve the accuracy and efficiency of EBRB systems. MaSFs and their corresponding algorithms are also regarded as a general optimization framework that can be used with other rule-based systems.