Multiobjective evolutionary feature selection for fuzzy classification

Abstract

The interpretability of classification systems refers to the ability of these to express their behavior in a way that is easily understandable by a user. Interpretable classification models allow for external validation by an expert and, in certain disciplines, such as medicine or business, providing information about decision making is essential for ethical and human reasons. Fuzzy rule based classification systems are consolidated powerful classification tools based on fuzzy logic and designed to produce interpretable models; however, in presence of a large number of attributes, even rule-based models tend to be too complex to be easily interpreted. In this paper, we propose a novel multivariate feature selection method in which both search strategy and classifier are based on multiobjective evolutionary computation. We designed a set of experiments to establish an acceptable setting with respect to the number of evaluations required by the search strategy and by the classifier. We tested our strategy on a real-life dataset and compared the results against a wide range of feature selection methods that includes filter, wrapper, multivariate, and univariate methods, with deterministic and probabilistic search strategies, and with evaluators of diverse nature. Finally, the fuzzy rule based classification model obtained with the proposed method has been evaluated with standard performance metrics and compared with other well-known fuzzy rule based classifiers. We have used two real-life datasets extracted from a contact center; in one case, with the proposed method, we obtained an accuracy of 0.7857 with eight rules, while the best fuzzy classifier compared obtained 0.7679 with eight rules, and in the second case, we obtained an accuracy of 0.7403 with five rules, while the best fuzzy classifier compared obtained 0.6364 with four rules.