Combining heterogeneous classifiers via granular prototypes

A Design of Granular Classifier Based on Granular Data Descriptors

Designing effective and efficient classifiers is a challenging task given the facts that data may exhibit different geometric structures and complex intrarelationships may exist within data. As a fundamental component of granular computing, information granules play a key role in human cognition. Therefore, it is of great interest to develop classifiers based on information granules such that highly interpretable human-centric models with higher accuracy can be constructed. In this study, we elaborate on a novel design methodology of granular classifiers in which information granules play a fundamental role. First, information granules are formed on the basis of labeled patterns following the principle of justifiable granularity. The diversity of samples embraced by each information granule is quantified and controlled in terms of the entropy criterion. This design implies that the information granules constructed in this way form sound homogeneous descriptors characterizing the structure and the diversity of available experimental data. Next, granular classifiers are built in the presence of formed information granules. The classification result for any input instance is determined by summing the contents of the related information granules weighted by membership degrees. The experiments concerning both synthetic data and publicly available datasets demonstrate that the proposed models exhibit better prediction abilities than some commonly encountered classifiers (namely, linear regression, support vector machine, Naïve Bayes, decision tree, and neural networks) and come with enhanced interpretability.