Active Learning Method (ALM) is one of the powerful tools in soft computing and it is inspired by the human brain capabilities in approaching complicated problems. ALM, which is in essence an adaptive fuzzy learning algorithm, tries to model a Multi-Input Single-Output system with several single-input single-output subsystems. Each of these subsystems is then modeled by an ink drop spread (IDS) plane. IDS operator, which is the main processing engine of ALM, extracts two kinds of informative features, Narrow Path and Spread, from each IDS plane without complicated computations. These features from all IDS planes are then aggregated in the inference engine. Despite the great performance of ALM in different applications, an efficient hardware implementation has remained a challenge, which is mainly due to considerably high memory requirement of IDS operation. In this paper, in a novel approach to IDS operation, we propose an abstract representation of the IDS planes which minimizes the memory requirement and the computational cost, and consequently, benefits the hardware implementation in terms of area and speed. The proposed approach is fully compatible with memristor-crossbar implementation with an adaptive learning capability. Simpler learning algorithm and higher speed make our proposed algorithm suitable for applications where real-time process, low-cost and small implementation are of high priority. Applications in the classification of real-world datasets and function approximation are provided to confirm the effectiveness of the algorithm. Eventually, the paper concludes that the proposed computing structure provides a synergy between artificial neural networks and fuzzy domains.
