Data mining with a simulated annealing based fuzzy classification system

In this paper, the use of simulated annealing (SA) metaheuristic for constructing a fuzzy classification system is presented. In several previous investigations, the capability of fuzzy systems to solve different kinds of problems has been demonstrated. Simulated annealing based fuzzy classification system (SAFCS), hybridizes the learning capability of SA metaheuristic with the approximate reasoning method of fuzzy systems. The objective of this paper is to illustrate the ability of SA to develop an accurate fuzzy classifier. The use of SA in classification is an attempt to effectively explore and exploit the large search space usually associated with classification problems, and find the optimum set of fuzzy if–then rules. The SAFCS would be capable to extract accurate fuzzy classification rules from input data sets, and applies them to classify new data instances in different predefined groups or classes. Experiments are performed with eight UCI data sets. The results indicate that the proposed SAFCS achieves competitive results in comparison with several well-known classification algorithms.