NN and fuzzy expert systems

This sounds like a project I have been working on. We developed a fuzzy
procedure to classify the benthic impacts of fish farming (Angel et al.
1998) and then used a neural network to analyse the evaluations of the
experts to create a fuzzy expert system (Silvert and Baptist 2000). The
procedure was to provide a team of experts with data, they evaluated the
data and produced the classification - we then fed the original data and the
expert conclusions into an NN to see if we could construct a black box that
would generate the same classification scheme.

Unfortunately we did not really have enough samples to construct a reliable
NN, although the results were promising. This is a common problem with the
use of NN in ecological situations, but I think the basic idea of feeding
both raw data and expert evaluations of those data into a neural network is
promising.

References below. Bill Silvert

Dror Angel, Peter Krost and William Silvert. 1998. Describing benthic
impacts of fish farming with fuzzy sets: theoretical background and
analytical methods. J. Appl. Ichthyol. 14: 1-8.

William Silvert and Martin Baptist. 2000. Can Neuronal Networks be used in
Data-Poor Situations? Presented at Int. Workshop on Applications of
Artificial Neural Networks to Ecological Modelling, Toulouse, France, 14-17
Dec. 1998. In: S. Lek & J.-F. Guégan (Eds.), Artificial Neuronal Networks;
Application to Ecology and Evolution. Springer-Verlag, Berlin, p. 241-248.


"William Siler" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote in message
news:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> Dmitry A. Kazakov <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote in message
news:<[EMAIL PROTECTED]>...
>
> > I would not set off NN against expert systems. Because it is
> > theoretically possible to build an expert system on the basis of a NN.
> > Consider "experts", which knowledge can be extracted in the form a
> > neuronal subnetwork. Then this knowledge, a description of a network,
> > is incorporated into a larger system using some standard framework.
> > That would be a NN-based expert system.
>
> This is a new idea to me, and is very interesting. The idea of looking
> at a neural net that has been conventionally constructed (from a
> training data set) as a fuzzy expert system, and extracting the rules
> from the resulting neural net, is of course not new; we seem to agree
> that this work has not been very satisfactory. But the idea of looking
> at a fuzzy expert system that has been constructed from expert
> knowledge rather than a training data set is new to me, and strikes me
> as being fairly important.
>
> Of course, real-world fuzzy expert systems are a lot more complicated
> than simple one-step fuzzy control expert systems. The expert systems
> I have constructed ten to be multi-step affairs, with the rules
> fireable in one step being fired in parallel, and the results of one
> step being fed as input to the next step. I think you mean that we
> could look at each epert system step as a layer in a neural net.
>
> We frequently have recursion, with the outputs being fed back as
> inputs to steps that have already been fired. Has anyone worked with
> neural nets in which the outputs of one layer are fed back as inputs
> to the same or a preceding layer?
>
> Sincerely, William Siler