The purpose of this paper is to present a new version of the Bacterial Algorithms used for fuzzy rule base extraction called Progressive Bacterial Algorithm. In order to explore high quality models with very good speed of convergence towards the optimal rule base, we develop an improved version of the Bacterial Evolutionary and former Bacterial Memetic Algorithms. It is shown, in case of multidimensional reference problems, by comparing with existing methods, that an efficient and fast convergent tool is obtained. © 2012 IEEE.