Using Qualitative Hypotheses to Identify Inaccurate Data

Identifying inaccurate data has long been regarded as a significant and difficult problem in AI. In this paper, we present a new method for identifying inaccurate data on the basis of qualitative correlations among related data. First, we introduce the definitions of related data and qualitative correlations among related data. Then we put forward a new concept called support coefficient function (SCF). SCF can be used to extract, represent, and calculate qualitative correlations among related data within a dataset. We propose an approach to determining dynamic shift intervals of inaccurate data, and an approach to calculating possibility of identifying inaccurate data, respectively. Both of the approaches are based on SCF. Finally we present an algorithm for identifying inaccurate data by using qualitative correlations among related data as confirmatory or disconfirmatory evidence. We have developed a practical system for interpreting infrared spectra by applying the method, and have fully tested the system against several hundred real spectra. The experimental results show that the method is significantly better than the conventional methods used in many similar systems.Comment: See http://www.jair.org/ for any accompanying file

A robust fuzzy possibilistic AHP approach for partner selection in international strategic alliance

The international strategic alliance is an inevitable solution for making competitive advantage and reducing the risk in today’s business environment. Partner selection is an important part in success of partnerships, and meanwhile it is a complicated decision because of various dimensions of the problem and inherent conflicts of stockholders. The purpose of this paper is to provide a practical approach to the problem of partner selection in international strategic alliances, which fulfills the gap between theories of inter-organizational relationships and quantitative models. Thus, a novel Robust Fuzzy Possibilistic AHP approach is proposed for combining the benefits of two complementary theories of inter-organizational relationships named, (1) Resource-based view, and (2) Transaction-cost theory and considering Fit theory as the perquisite of alliance success. The Robust Fuzzy Possibilistic AHP approach is a noveldevelopment of Interval-AHP technique employing robust formulation; aimed at handling the ambiguity of the problem and let the use of intervals as pairwise judgments. The proposed approach was compared with existing approaches, and the results show that it provides the best quality solutions in terms of minimum error degree. Moreover, the framework implemented in a case study and its applicability were discussed

On fuzzy-qualitative descriptions and entropy

This paper models the assessments of a group of experts when evaluating different magnitudes, features or objects by using linguistic descriptions. A new general representation of linguistic descriptions is provided by unifying ordinal and fuzzy perspectives. Fuzzy qualitative labels are proposed as a generalization of the concept of qualitative labels over a well-ordered set. A lattice structure is established in the set of fuzzy-qualitative labels to enable the introduction of fuzzy-qualitative descriptions as L-fuzzy sets. A theorem is given that characterizes finite fuzzy partitions using fuzzy-qualitative labels, the cores and supports of which are qualitative labels. This theorem leads to a mathematical justification for commonly-used fuzzy partitions of real intervals via trapezoidal fuzzy sets. The information of a fuzzy-qualitative label is defined using a measure of specificity, in order to introduce the entropy of fuzzy-qualitative descriptions. (C) 2016 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

A multiplexed mixed-signal fuzzy architecture

Analog circuits provide better area/power efficiency than their digital counterparts for low-medium precision requirements. This limit in precision as well as the lack of design tools when compared to the digital approach, imposes a limit of complexity, hence fuzzy analog controllers are usually oriented to fast low-power systems with low-medium complexity. The paper presents a strategy to preserve most of the advantages of an analog implementation, while allowing a notorious increment of the system complexity. Such strategy consists in implementing a reduced number of rules, those that really determine the output in a lattice controller, which we call analog core, then this core is dynamically programmed to perform the computation related to a specific rule set. The data to program the analog core are stored in a memory, and constitutes the whole knowledge base in a kind of virtual rule set. HSPICE simulations from an exemplary controller are shown to illustrate the viability of the proposal

Non-constructive interval simulation of dynamic systems

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Different distance measures for fuzzy linear regression with Monte Carlo methods

The aim of this study was to determine the best distance measure for estimating the fuzzy linear regression model parameters with Monte Carlo (MC) methods. It is pointed out that only one distance measure is used for fuzzy linear regression with MC methods within the literature. Therefore, three different definitions of distance measure between two fuzzy numbers are introduced. Estimation accuracies of existing and proposed distance measures are explored with the simulation study. Distance measures are compared to each other in terms of estimation accuracy; hence this study demonstrates that the best distance measures to estimate fuzzy linear regression model parameters with MC methods are the distance measures defined by Kaufmann and Gupta (Introduction to fuzzy arithmetic theory and applications. Van Nostrand Reinhold, New York, 1991), Heilpern-2 (Fuzzy Sets Syst 91(2):259–268, 1997) and Chen and Hsieh (Aust J Intell Inf Process Syst 6(4):217–229, 2000). One the other hand, the worst distance measure is the distance measure used by Abdalla and Buckley (Soft Comput 11:991–996, 2007; Soft Comput 12:463–468, 2008). These results would be useful to enrich the studies that have already focused on fuzzy linear regression models

A Deep Spatio-Temporal Fuzzy Neural Network for Passenger Demand Prediction

In spite of its importance, passenger demand prediction is a highly challenging problem, because the demand is simultaneously influenced by the complex interactions among many spatial and temporal factors and other external factors such as weather. To address this problem, we propose a Spatio-TEmporal Fuzzy neural Network (STEF-Net) to accurately predict passenger demands incorporating the complex interactions of all known important factors. We design an end-to-end learning framework with different neural networks modeling different factors. Specifically, we propose to capture spatio-temporal feature interactions via a convolutional long short-term memory network and model external factors via a fuzzy neural network that handles data uncertainty significantly better than deterministic methods. To keep the temporal relations when fusing two networks and emphasize discriminative spatio-temporal feature interactions, we employ a novel feature fusion method with a convolution operation and an attention layer. As far as we know, our work is the first to fuse a deep recurrent neural network and a fuzzy neural network to model complex spatial-temporal feature interactions with additional uncertain input features for predictive learning. Experiments on a large-scale real-world dataset show that our model achieves more than 10% improvement over the state-of-the-art approaches.Comment: https://epubs.siam.org/doi/abs/10.1137/1.9781611975673.1

A survey on utilization of data mining approaches for dermatological (skin) diseases prediction

Due to recent technology advances, large volumes of medical data is obtained. These data contain valuable information. Therefore data mining techniques can be used to extract useful patterns. This paper is intended to introduce data mining and its various techniques and a survey of the available literature on medical data mining. We emphasize mainly on the application of data mining on skin diseases. A categorization has been provided based on the different data mining techniques. The utility of the various data mining methodologies is highlighted. Generally association mining is suitable for extracting rules. It has been used especially in cancer diagnosis. Classification is a robust method in medical mining. In this paper, we have summarized the different uses of classification in dermatology. It is one of the most important methods for diagnosis of erythemato-squamous diseases. There are different methods like Neural Networks, Genetic Algorithms and fuzzy classifiaction in this topic. Clustering is a useful method in medical images mining. The purpose of clustering techniques is to find a structure for the given data by finding similarities between data according to data characteristics. Clustering has some applications in dermatology. Besides introducing different mining methods, we have investigated some challenges which exist in mining skin data