Numerical Method for Fractional Fuzzy Integral Equations

In the present work we construct an iterative method for the numerical solution of fuzzy fractional Volterra integral equations, by using the technique of fuzzy product integration. The existence and uniqueness of the solution and the uniform boundedness of the terms of the Picard iterations are proved. The convergence of the iterative algorithm is obtained and the apriori error estimate is given in terms of the Lipschitz constants. A numerical example illustrates the accuracy of the method.

Fuzzy Integral-Based Multi-Classifiers Ensemble for Android Malware Classification

One of the most commonly used operating systems for smartphones is Android. The open-source nature of the Android operating system and the ability to include third-party Android apps from various markets has led to potential threats to user privacy. Malware developers use sophisticated methods that are intentionally designed to bypass the security checks currently used in smartphones. This makes effective detection of Android malware apps a difficult problem and important issue. This paper proposes a novel fuzzy integral-based multi-classifier ensemble to improve the accuracy of Android malware classification. The proposed approach utilizes the Choquet fuzzy integral as an aggregation function for the purpose of combining and integrating the classification results of several classifiers such as XGBoost, Random Forest, Decision Tree, AdaBoost, and LightGBM. Moreover, the proposed approach utilizes an adaptive fuzzy measure to consider the dynamic nature of the data in each classifier and the consistency and coalescence between each possible subset of classifiers. This enables the proposed approach to aggregate the classification results from the multiple classifiers. The experimental results using the dataset, consisting of 9476 Android goodware apps and 5560 malware Android apps, show that the proposed approach for Android malware classification based on the Choquet fuzzy integral technique outperforms the single classifiers and achieves the highest accuracy of 95.08%.

Performance Analysis of Data Fusion Methods Applied to Epileptic Seizure Recognition

Epilepsy is a chronic neurological disorder that is caused by unprovoked recurrent seizures. The most commonly used tool for the diagnosis of epilepsy is the electroencephalogram (EEG) whereby the electrical activity of the brain is measured. In order to prevent potential risks, the patients have to be monitored as to detect an epileptic episode early on and to provide prevention measures. Many different research studies have used a combination of time and frequency features for the automatic recognition of epileptic seizures. In this paper, two fusion methods are compared. The first is based on an ensemble method and the second uses the Choquet fuzzy integral method. In particular, three different machine learning approaches namely RNN, ML and DNN are used as inputs for the ensemble method and the Choquet fuzzy integral fusion method. Evaluation measures such as confusion matrix, AUC and accuracy are compared as well as MSE and RMSE are provided. The results show that the Choquet fuzzy integral fusion method outperforms the ensemble method as well as other state-of-the-art classification methods.

Tourism Demand Forecasting Using Nonadditive Forecast Combinations

Accurately forecasting the demand for tourism can help governments formulate industrial policies and guide the business sector in investment planning. Combining forecasts can improve the accuracy of forecasting the demand for tourism, but limited work has been devoted to developing such combinations. This article addresses two significant issues in this context. First, the linear combination is the commonly used method of combining tourism forecasts. However, additive techniques unreasonably ignore interactions among the inputs. Second, the available data often do not adhere to specific statistical assumptions. Grey prediction has thus drawn attention because it does not require that the data follow any statistical distribution. This study proposes a nonadditive combination method by using the fuzzy integral to integrate single-model forecasts obtained from individual grey prediction models. Using China and Taiwan tourism demand as empirical cases, the results show that the proposed method outperforms the other combined methods considered here.

Fuzzy Integral With Particle Swarm Optimization for CNN-Based Motor-Imagery EEG Classification

Recently, decoding human electroencephalographic (EEG) data using convolutional neural network (CNN) has driven the state-of-the-art recognition of motor-imagery EEG patterns for brain-computer interfacing (BCI). While a variety of CNN models have been used to classify motor-imagery EEG data, it is unclear if aggregating an ensemble of heterogeneous CNN models could further enhance the classification performance. To integrate the outputs of ensemble classifiers, this work utilizes fuzzy integral with particle swarm optimization (PSO) to estimate optimal confidence levels assigned to classifiers. The proposed framework aggregates CNN classifiers and fuzzy integral with PSO, achieving robust performance in single-trial classification of motor-imagery EEG data across various CNN model training schemes depending on the scenarios of BCI usage. This proof-of-concept study demonstrates the feasibility of applying fuzzy fusion techniques to enhance CNN-based EEG decoding and benefit practical applications of BCI.