Robust fuzzy relational classifier incorporating the soft class labels

Fuzzy relational classifier (FRC) is a recently proposed two-step nonlinear classifier. At first, the unsupervised fuzzy c-means (FCM) clustering is performed to explore the underlying groups of the given dataset. Then, a fuzzy relation matrix indicating the relationship between the formed groups and the given classes is constructed for subsequent classification. It has been shown that FRC has two advantages: interpretable classification results and avoidance of overtraining. However, FRC not only lacks the robustness which is very important for a classifier, but also fails on the dataset with non-spherical distributions. Moreover, the classification mechanism of FRC is sensitive to the improper class labels of the training samples, thus leading to considerable decline in classification performance. The purpose of this paper is to develop a Robust FRC (RFRC) algorithm aiming at overcoming or mitigating all of the above disadvantages of FRC and maintaining its original advantages. In the proposed RFRC algorithm, we employ our previously proposed robust kernelized FCM (KFCM) to replace FCM to enhance its robustness against outliers and its suitability for the non-spherical data structures. In addition, we incorporate the soft class labels into the classification mechanism to improve its performance, especially for the datasets containing the improper class labels. The experimental results on 2 artificial and 11 real-life benchmark datasets demonstrate that RFRC algorithm can consistently outperform FRC in classification performance.