Experiments with Supervised Fuzzy LVQ

Prototype based classifiers so far can only work with hard labels on the training data. In order to allow for soft labels as input label and answer, we enhanced the original LVQ algorithm. The key idea is adapting the prototypes depending on the similarity of their fuzzy labels to the ones of training samples. In experiments, the performance of the fuzzy LVQ was compared against the original approach. Of special interest was the behaviour of the two approaches, once noise was added to the training labels, and here a clear advantage of fuzzy versus hard training labels could be shown.