Fuzzy systems with defuzzification are universal approximators

Abstract

In this paper, we consider a fundamental theoretical question: Is it always possible to design a fuzzy system capable of approximating any real continuous function on a compact set with arbitrary accuracy? Moreover, we research whether the answer to the above question is positive when we restrict to a fixed (but arbitrary) type of fuzzy reasoning and to a subclass of fuzzy relations. This result can be viewed as an existence theorem of an optimal fuzzy system for a wide variety of problems.