Fuzzy Rule-Based Modeling with Applications to Geophysical, Biological, and Engineering Systems

Rating:
Summary: Excellent intro to fuzzy rule-based modeling, with examples.
Review: Many good books have recently been published on fuzzyrule-based systems for control, but few authors have dealtwith open systems. The book by Bardossy and Duckstein, which does an excellent job of introducing fuzzy rule-based modeling of open systems, may stimulate more research in this area. Indeed, the realistic examples presented in the book are very convincing. More emphasis could however have been put on the complex processes of selecting input variables and defining fuzzy rules. The discussion, in the introduction, of the differences between fuzzy numbers and probability distributions is certainly too short to convince a statistician of the usefulness of fuzzy sets for uncertainty modeling. However, if the book does not contribute to this philosophical debate, it certainly does a good job of showing the practical value of fuzzy models for nonparametric modeling of open systems.