Multi-Objective Optimization Framework in the Modeling of Belief Rule-Based Systems with Interpretability-Accuracy Trade-Off

The belief rule-based (BRB) system has been popular in complexity system modeling due to its good interpretability. However, the current mainstream optimization methods of the BRB systems only focus on modeling accuracy but ignore the interpretability. The single-objective optimization strategy has been applied in the interpretability-accuracy trade-off by integrating accuracy and interpretability into an optimization objective. But the integration has a greater impact on optimization results with strong subjectivity. Thus, a multi-objective optimization framework in the modeling of BRB systems with interpretability-accuracy trade-off is proposed in this paper. Firstly, complexity and accuracy are taken as two independent optimization goals, and uniformity as a constraint to give the mathematical description. Secondly, a classical multi-objective optimization algorithm, nondominated sorting genetic algorithm II (NSGA-II), is utilized as an optimization tool to give a set of BRB systems with different accuracy and complexity. Finally, a pipeline leakage detection case is studied to verify the feasibility and effectiveness of the developed multi-objective optimization. The comparison illustrates that the proposed multi-objective optimization framework can effectively avoid the subjectivity of single-objective optimization, and has capability of joint optimizing the structure and parameters of BRB systems with interpretability-accuracy trade-off.