The inductive learning of fuzzy rule-based classification systems suffers from exponential growth of the fuzzy rule search space when the number of patterns and/or variables becomes high. This growth makes the learning process more difficult and, in most cases, it leads to problems of scalability (in terms of the time and memory consumed) and/or complexity (with respect to the number of rules obtained and the number of variables included in each rule). In this paper, we propose a fuzzy association rule-based classification method for high-dimensional problems, which is based on three stages to obtain an accurate and compact fuzzy rule-based classifier with a low computational cost. This method limits the order of the associations in the association rule extraction and considers the use of subgroup discovery, which is based on an improved weighted relative accuracy measure to preselect the most interesting rules before a genetic postprocessing process for rule selection and parameter tuning. The results that are obtained more than 26 real-world datasets of different sizes and with different numbers of variables demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.