The USC Andrew and Erna Viterbi School of Engineering USC Signal and Image Processing Institute USC Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering University of Southern California

Technical Report USC-SIPI-312

“Neural Fuzzy Agents for Profile Learning and Adaptive Object Matching”

by Sanya Mitaim and Bart Kosko

June 1997

A neural fuzzy system can learn an agent profile of a user when it samples user question-answer data. A fuzzy system uses if-then rules to store and compress the agent's knowledge of the user's likes and dislikes. A neural system uses training data to form and tune the rules. The profile is a preference map or a bumpy utility surface defined over the space of search objects. Rules define fuzzy patches that cover the surface bumps as learning unfolds and as the fuzzy agent system gives a finer approximation of the profile. The agent system searches for preferred objects with the learned profile and with a new fuzzy measure of similarity. The appendix derives the supervised learning law that tunes this matching measure with fresh sample data. We test the fuzzy agent profile system on object spaces of flowers and sunsets and test the fuzzy agent matching system on an object space of sunset images. Rule explosion and data acquisition impose fundamental limits on the system designs.


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