Supervised Hierarchical Clustering in Fuzzy Model Identification

This paper presents a new, supervised, hierarchical clustering algorithm (SUHICLUST) for fuzzy model identification. The presented algorithm solves the problem of global model accuracy, together with the interpretability of local models as valid linearizations of the modeled nonlinear system. The algorithm combines the advantages of supervised, hierarchical algorithms, which are based on heuristic tree-construction algorithms, together with the advantages of fuzzy product space clustering. The high flexibility of the validity functions that is obtained by fuzzy clustering combined with supervised learning results in an efficient partitioning algorithm, which is independent of initialization and results in a parsimonious fuzzy model. Furthermore, the usability of SUHICLUST is very undemanding, because it delivers, in contrast with many other methods, reproducible results. In order to get reasonable results, the user only has to set either a threshold for the maximum number of local models or a value for the maximum allowed global model error as a termination criterion. For fine-tuning, the interpolation smoothness controls the degree of regularization. The performance is illustrated on both analytical examples and benchmark problems from the literature.