Multilayered reasoning by means of conceptual fuzzy sets

The real world consists of instances of events and continuous numeric values, while people represent and process their knowledge in terms of symbols. Fuzzy sets provide a strong notation connecting the symbolic representation to the real world. In previously proposed Conceptual Fuzzy Sets (CFS), the meaning of a concept is represented by the distribution of activations of labels in a bidirectional associative memory. In particular, a multilayered structured CFS represents the meaning of the same concept as it is used in various expressions in each layer. The propagation of activations corresponds to reasoning. Therefore, we propose a multilayered reasoning method associated to a multilayered structured CFS, which has the following features: (1) capable of simultaneous symbolic and quantitative processing, (2) capable of simultaneous top-down and bottom-up processing. The effectiveness of the proposed method is illustrated by practical examples of decision regarding the amount of steering in the task of parking a car, and recognition of facial expressions for an image understanding system. © 1996 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.