A Consensus Approach to the Sentiment Analysis Problem Driven by Support-Based IOWA Majority

In group decision making, there are many situations where the opinion of the majority of participants is critical. The scenarios could be multiple, like a number of doctors finding commonality on the diagnose of an illness or parliament members looking for consensus on an specific law being passed. In this article, we present a method that utilizes induced ordered weighted averaging (IOWA) operators to aggregate a majority opinion from a number of sentiment analysis (SA) classification systems, where the latter occupy the role usually taken by human decision-makers as typically seen in group decision situations. In this case, the numerical outputs of different SA classification methods are used as input to a specific IOWA operator that is semantically close to the fuzzy linguistic quantifier ‘most of’. The object of the aggregation will be the intensity of the previously determined sentence polarity in such a way that the results represent what the majority think. During the experimental phase, the use of the IOWA operator coupled with the linguistic quantifier ‘most’ (math formula) proved to yield superior results compared to those achieved when utilizing other techniques commonly applied when some sort of averaging is needed, such as arithmetic mean or median techniques

Dynamic Federated Learning Model for Identifying Adversarial Clients

Federated learning, as a distributed learning that conducts the training on the local devices without accessing to the training data, is vulnerable to dirty-label data poisoning adversarial attacks. We claim that the federated learning model has to avoid those kind of adversarial attacks through filtering out the clients that manipulate the local data. We propose a dynamic federated learning model that dynamically discards those adversarial clients, which allows to prevent the corruption of the global learning model. We evaluate the dynamic discarding of adversarial clients deploying a deep learning classification model in a federated learning setting, and using the EMNIST Digits and Fashion MNIST image classification datasets. Likewise, we analyse the capacity of detecting clients with poor data distribution and reducing the number of rounds of learning by selecting the clients to aggregate. The results show that the dynamic selection of the clients to aggregate enhances the performance of the global learning model, discards the adversarial and poor clients and reduces the rounds of learning.Comment: 11 pages, 6 figure

Fuzzy Techniques for Decision Making 2018

Zadeh's fuzzy set theory incorporates the impreciseness of data and evaluations, by imputting the degrees by which each object belongs to a set. Its success fostered theories that codify the subjectivity, uncertainty, imprecision, or roughness of the evaluations. Their rationale is to produce new flexible methodologies in order to model a variety of concrete decision problems more realistically. This Special Issue garners contributions addressing novel tools, techniques and methodologies for decision making (inclusive of both individual and group, single- or multi-criteria decision making) in the context of these theories. It contains 38 research articles that contribute to a variety of setups that combine fuzziness, hesitancy, roughness, covering sets, and linguistic approaches. Their ranges vary from fundamental or technical to applied approaches

Use of aggregation functions in decision making

A key component of many decision making processes is the aggregation step, whereby a set of numbers is summarised with a single representative value. This research showed that aggregation functions can provide a mathematical formalism to deal with issues like vagueness and uncertainty, which arise naturally in various decision contexts

Fuzzy Sets in Business Management, Finance, and Economics

This book collects fifteen papers published in s Special Issue of Mathematics titled “Fuzzy Sets in Business Management, Finance, and Economics”, which was published in 2021. These paper cover a wide range of different tools from Fuzzy Set Theory and applications in many areas of Business Management and other connected fields. Specifically, this book contains applications of such instruments as, among others, Fuzzy Set Qualitative Comparative Analysis, Neuro-Fuzzy Methods, the Forgotten Effects Algorithm, Expertons Theory, Fuzzy Markov Chains, Fuzzy Arithmetic, Decision Making with OWA Operators and Pythagorean Aggregation Operators, Fuzzy Pattern Recognition, and Intuitionistic Fuzzy Sets. The papers in this book tackle a wide variety of problems in areas such as strategic management, sustainable decisions by firms and public organisms, tourism management, accounting and auditing, macroeconomic modelling, the evaluation of public organizations and universities, and actuarial modelling. We hope that this book will be useful not only for business managers, public decision-makers, and researchers in the specific fields of business management, finance, and economics but also in the broader areas of soft mathematics in social sciences. Practitioners will find methods and ideas that could be fruitful in current management issues. Scholars will find novel developments that may inspire further applications in the social sciences

New Development of Neutrosophic Probability, Neutrosophic Statistics, Neutrosophic Algebraic Structures, and Neutrosophic & Plithogenic Optimizations

This Special Issue puts forward for discussion state-of-the-art papers on new topics related to neutrosophic theories, such as neutrosophic algebraic structures, neutrosophic triplet algebraic structures, neutrosophic extended triplet algebraic structures, neutrosophic algebraic hyperstructures, neutrosophic triplet algebraic hyperstructures, neutrosophic n-ary algebraic structures, neutrosophic n-ary algebraic hyperstructures, refined neutrosophic algebraic structures, refined neutrosophic algebraic hyperstructures, quadruple neutrosophic algebraic structures, refined quadruple neutrosophic algebraic structures, neutrosophic image processing, neutrosophic image classification, neutrosophic computer vision, neutrosophic machine learning, neutrosophic artificial intelligence, neutrosophic data analytics, neutrosophic deep learning, neutrosophic symmetry, and their applications in the real world. This book leads to the further advancement of the neutrosophic and plithogenic theories of NeutroAlgebra and AntiAlgebra, NeutroGeometry and AntiGeometry, Neutrosophic n-SuperHyperGraph (the most general form of graph of today), Neutrosophic Statistics, Plithogenic Logic as a generalization of MultiVariate Logic, Plithogenic Probability and Plithogenic Statistics as a generalization of MultiVariate Probability and Statistics, respectively, and presents their countless applications in our every-day world

A Hybrid Approach to the Sentiment Analysis Problem at the Sentence Level

This doctoral thesis deals with a number of challenges related to investigating and devising solutions to the Sentiment Analysis Problem, a subset of the discipline known as Natural Language Processing (NLP), following a path that differs from the most common approaches currently in-use. The majority of the research and applications building in Sentiment Analysis (SA) / Opinion Mining (OM) have been conducted and developed using Supervised Machine Learning techniques. It is our intention to prove that a hybrid approach merging fuzzy sets, a solid sentiment lexicon, traditional NLP techniques and aggregation methods will have the effect of compounding the power of all the positive aspects of these tools. In this thesis we will prove three main aspects, namely: 1. That a Hybrid Classification Model based on the techniques mentioned in the previous paragraphs will be capable of: (a) performing same or better than established Supervised Machine Learning techniques -namely, Naïve Bayes and Maximum Entropy (ME)- when the latter are utilised respectively as the only classification methods being applied, when calculating subjectivity polarity, and (b) computing the intensity of the polarity previously estimated. 2. That cross-ratio uninorms can be used to effectively fuse the classification outputs of several algorithms producing a compensatory effect. 3. That the Induced Ordered Weighted Averaging (IOWA) operator is a very good choice to model the opinion of the majority (consensus) when the outputs of a number of classification methods are combined together. For academic and experimental purposes we have built the proposed methods and associated prototypes in an iterative fashion: Step 1: we start with the so-called Hybrid Standard Classification (HSC) method, responsible for subjectivity polarity determination. Step 2: then, we have continued with the Hybrid Advanced Classification (HAC) method that computes the polarity intensity of opinions/sentiments. Step 3: in closing, we present two methods that produce a semantic-specific aggregation of two or more classification methods, as a complement to the HSC/HAC methods when the latter cannot generate a classification value or when we are looking for an aggregation that implies consensus, respectively: *the Hybrid Advanced Classification with Aggregation by Cross-ratio Uninorm (HACACU) method

VIKOR Technique:A Systematic Review of the State of the Art Literature on Methodologies and Applications

The main objective of this paper is to present a systematic review of the VlseKriterijuska Optimizacija I Komoromisno Resenje (VIKOR) method in several application areas such as sustainability and renewable energy. This study reviewed a total of 176 papers, published in 2004 to 2015, from 83 high-ranking journals; most of which were related to Operational Research, Management Sciences, decision making, sustainability and renewable energy and were extracted from the “Web of Science and Scopus” databases. Papers were classified into 15 main application areas. Furthermore, papers were categorized based on the nationalities of authors, dates of publications, techniques and methods, type of studies, the names of the journals and studies purposes. The results of this study indicated that more papers on VIKOR technique were published in 2013 than in any other year. In addition, 13 papers were published about sustainability and renewable energy fields. Furthermore, VIKOR and fuzzy VIKOR methods, had the first rank in use. Additionally, the Journal of Expert Systems with Applications was the most significant journal in this study, with 27 publications on the topic. Finally, Taiwan had the first rank from 22 nationalities which used VIKOR technique

Lessons Learned and Next Steps in Energy Efficiency Measurement and Attribution: Energy Savings, Net to Gross, Non-Energy Benefits, and Persistence of Energy Efficiency Behavior

This white paper examines four topics addressing evaluation, measurement, and attribution of direct and indirect effects to energy efficiency and behavioral programs: Estimates of program savings (gross); Net savings derivation through free ridership / net to gross analyses; Indirect non-energy benefits / impacts (e.g., comfort, convenience, emissions, jobs); and, Persistence of savings