Fuzzy heterogeneous neurons for imprecise classification problems

Abstract

In the classical neuron model, inputs are continuous real-valued quantities. However, in many important domains from the real world, objects are described by a mixture of continuous and discrete variables, usually containing missing information and uncertainty. In this paper, a general class of neuron models accepting heterogeneous inputs in the form of mixtures of continuous (crisp and/or fuzzy) and discrete quantities admitting missing data is presented. From these, several particular models can be derived as instances and different neural architectures constructed with them. Such models deal in a natural way with problems for which information is imprecise or even missing. Their possibilities in classification and diagnostic problems are here illustrated by experiments with data from a real-world domain in the field of environmental studies. These experiments show that such neurons can both learn and classify complex data very effectively in the presence of uncertain information.