A comparison of methodologies for fuzzy expert system creation--application to arrhythmic beat classification.

In this work, three different methodologies for fuzzy expert systems creation are compared: a well-known neuro-fuzzy approach, a knowledge-based approach and a novel methodology, based on rule-extraction. The adaptive neuro-fuzzy information system (ANFIS) is used to automatically generate a fuzzy expert system. In the knowledge-based approach and the rule-extraction methodology, the idea is to start with a model described by crisp rules, provided by medical experts in the first case or extracted using data mining techniques in the second, and then to transform them into a set of fuzzy rules, creating a fuzzy model. In either case, the adjustment of the model's parameters is performed via a stochastic global optimization procedure. All three approaches are applied to a medical domain problem, the cardiac arrhythmic beat classification. The ability to interpret the decisions made from the created fuzzy expert systems is a major advantage compared to other "black box" approaches.