Hybrid Knowledge Extraction Framework Using Modified Adaptive Genetic Algorithm and BPNN

Fault diagnosis based on the expert system (ES) is still a research topic of manufacturing in Industry 4.0 because of the stronger interpretability. As the core component of the ES, fault diagnosis accuracy is positively correlated to the precision of the knowledge base. But it is difficult for users to understand the knowledge obtained from the original dataset utilizing the existing knowledge extraction method. Therefore, it is of great significance to extract easy-to-understand and exact rules from the NN framework. This paper proposes a hybrid extraction framework to perform the rule extraction for overcoming this drawback. First, an improved adaptive genetic algorithm (GA) using a logistic function, namely LAGA, is proposed to solve the traditional GA’s insufficient prediction performance issue. Compared with the other three mainstream adaptive GAs, the experiment results of optimizing six selected test functions by these GA variants show that the LAGA algorithm’s convergence accuracy and speed have been greatly improved, especially for high latitude functions. On this basis, a rule extraction method based on the symbol rule and NN, namely the LAGA-BP framework, is discussed in this manuscript to classify the real-valued attributes. This framework obtains hidden knowledge (knowledge refinement process) by NN and further transforms the acquired hidden knowledge into more easy-to-understand rule knowledge (rule extraction process). The execution of the LAGA-BP framework could be separated into two phases. The first phase is to optimize a back propagation NN (BPNN) using the LAGA and refine prediction classification knowledge over the optimized BPNN. In the second phase, an attribute reduction algorithm using multi-layered NN (SD algorithm) based on two different superposed networks is used in this framework to reduce data-set attributes and then uses the K-means clustering algorithm to extract the if-then rule from the simplified attributes. The Wisconsin breast cancer dataset is used as a case study to reveal the correctness and robustness of the proposed LAGA-BP method. Consulting relevant medical personnel and referencing relevant data shows that the rules extracted using this method help verify the diagnosis results, thus verifying the proposed framework’s feasibility and practicality.