IFSA 2007 World Congress

Cancun, Mexico, June 18-21, 2007

SPECIAL SESSION 6SS

Fuzzy Trees

Organizers: Zhiheng Huang and Masoud Nikravesh

{zhiheng, [email-masked]

Electrical Engineering and Computer

Science University of California at Berkeley

CA 94720, USA

Phone: 1-510-643-4523 (Zhiheng) and 1-510-643-4522 (Masoud)

Fax: 1-510-643-4519

SCOPE: The main aim of this special session is to bring together researchers and scientists who have the same interest in fuzzy trees, which include fuzzy decision trees, fuzzy signatures, fuzzy multiple aggregator trees, pattern trees and other form of trees such as fuzzy hierarchical structures.

Fuzzy decision tree induction is the fuzzy extension of classical decision tree induction. Fuzzy decision trees have been widely used in varied applications and consistently show good accuracy in classification applications. Fuzzy signatures have been proposed to model complex structures of the data points using different aggregation operators such as MIN, MAX and AVERAGE. Fuzzy multiple aggregator trees which make use of more choices of aggregation operators have been introduced and the tree induction method has been proposed by means of genetic programming. Pattern trees have been suggested to represent the structures of classes via different aggregations over fuzzy terms. The experimental work shows they can outperform fuzzy decision trees.

Fuzzy trees are an effective and efficient tool for fuzzy classification and decision analysis. Conventional fuzzy rules can be extracted from fuzzy trees, and therefore transparency and comprehensibility are preserved. In addition, tree representations are able to significantly reduce the computation expense at the test stage, compared to conventional fuzzy rule bases.

The objective of the special session is to provide an opportunity to exchange ideas on the theoretical research and/or applications of fuzzy trees. It would be interesting to compare different fuzzy trees to identify the advantages and drawbacks of each fuzzy tree. Hopefully the discussion in this special session will lead to new research directions for fuzzy trees.

The organizers welcome contributions on the fields of (but not limited to):

- fuzzy decision trees

- fuzzy signatures

- fuzzy multiple aggregators trees

- pattern trees

- fuzzy hierarchical structures

- other forms of trees

We encourage submissions of papers that report on  theoretical advances in fuzzy trees as well as papers that concern applications of such fields.

Proposed contribution should be sent by e-mail to the organizers of the session by October 16, 2006. The same deadlines as for the regular papers to be submitted to the IFSA 2007 World Congress will be observed. Submitted papers must comply to the IFSA 2007 World Congress guidelines for submission. All submitted papers will be refereed by experts in the field.