A probabilistic fuzzy approach to modeling nonlinear systems

Recently, the study of incorporating probability theory and fuzzy logic has received much interest. To endow the traditional fuzzy rule-based systems (FRBs) with probabilistic features to handle randomness, this paper presents a probabilistic fuzzy neural network (ProFNN) by introducing the probability of input linguistic terms and providing linguistic meaning into the connectionist architecture. ProFNN integrates the probabilistic information of fuzzy rules into the antecedent parts and quantifies the impacts of the rules on the consequent parts using mutual subsethood, which work in conjunction with volume defuzzification in a gradient descent learning frame work. Despite the increase in the number of parameters, ProFNN provides a promising solution to deal with randomness and fuzziness in a single frame. To evaluate the performance and applicability of the proposed approach, ProFNN is carried out on various benchmarking problems and compared with other existing models with a performance better than most of them.