Bayesian Approach to Intelligent Control and Its Relation to Fuzzy Control

Kongliang Zhu, Olga Kosheleva, Vladik Kreinovich

Abstract

In many application areas including economics, experts describe theirknowledge by using imprecise (“fuzzy”) words from natural language. To designan automatic control system, it is therefore necessary to translate this knowledgeinto precise computer-understandable terms. To perform such a translation, a spe-cial semi-heuristic fuzzy methodology was designed. This methodology has beensuccessfully applied to many practical problem, but its semi-heuristic character isa big obstacle to its use: without a theoretical justification, we are never 100%sure that this methodology will be successful in other applications as well. It istherefore desirable to come up with either a theoretical justification of exactly thismethodology, or with a theoretically justified modification of this methodology. Inthis paper, we apply the Bayesian techniques to the above translation problem, and we analyze when the resulting methodology is identical to fuzzy techniques –and when it is different.