Consensus, dissension and precision in group decision making by means of an algebraic extension of hesitant fuzzy linguistic term sets

Present measures of the degree of agreement in group decision-making using hesitant fuzzy linguistic term sets allow consensus or agreement measurement when decision makers’ assessments involve hesitance. Yet they do not discriminate with different degrees of consensus among situations with discordant or polarized assessments. The visualization of differences among groups for which there is no agreement but different possible levels of disagreement is an important issue in collective decision-making situations. In this paper, we propose new collective and individual consensus measures that explicitly consider the hesitance of the decision makers’ hesitance in giving an opinion and also the gap between non-overlapping assessments, thus allowing the measurement of the polarization present within the group's opinions. In addition, an expert's profile is defined by considering the expert's behavior in previous assessments in group decision-making processes in terms of precision and dissension.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Evaluating student-internship fit by using fuzzy linguistic terms and a fuzzy OWA operator

© 20xx IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting /republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other worksPersonnel selection is a well-known problem that is made difficult by incomplete and imprecise information about candidate and position compatibility. This paper shows how positions, which satisfy candidate’s interests, can be identified with fuzzy linguistic terms and a fuzzy OWA operator. A set of relevant positions aligned with a student’s interests is selected using this approach. The mplementation of the proposed method is illustrated using a numerical example in a business application.Postprint (author's final draft

Finding the most sustainable wind farm sites with a hierarchical outranking decision aiding method

The final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10479-017-2590-4This paper considers the problem of finding suitable sites for wind farms in a region of Catalonia (Spain). The evaluation criteria are structured into a hierarchy that identifies several intermediate sub-goals dealing with different points of view. Therefore, the recent ELECTRE-III-H hierarchical multi-criteria analysis method is proposed as a good solution to help decision-makers. This method establishes an order among the set of possible sites for the wind farms for each sub-goal. ELECTRE-III-H aggregates these orders into an overall order using different parameters. The procedure is based on the construction and exploitation of a pairwise outranking relation, following the principles of concordance (i.e. majority rule) and discordance (i.e. respect for the minority opinions). This paper makes two main contributions. First, it contributes to the ELECTRE-III-H method by studying its mathematical properties for the construction of outranking relations. Second, the case study is solved and its results show that we can effectively represent and manage the overall influence of the various criteria on the global result at different levels of the hierarchy. The paper compares different scenarios with strict, normal, and optimistic preference, indifference and veto thresholds. Results show that the best site differs for technical, economic, environmental, and social intermediate criteria. Therefore, the best overall solution changes depending on the preference and veto thresholds fixed at the intermediate level of the hierarchy.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

A Transformational creativity tool to support musical composition

In this paper we use the idea of conceptual space introduced by Boden and redefine some properties such appropriateness and relevance that facilitate the computational implementation of the transformational creativity mechanism. While appropriateness can only be evaluated by an expert, relevance can be objectively measured for any spectator. Computational creativity is based on the relationship between appropriateness and relevance of a concept, and therefore a computational system can be used to support this task. The paper analyses this relationship in the field of music in order to obtain a computer tool to support the musical composition task.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

Modeling group assessments by means of hesitant fuzzy linguistic term sets

Hesitant linguistic term sets have been introduced to capture the human way of reasoning using linguistic expressions involving different levels of precision. In this paper, a lattice structure is provided to the set of hesitant fuzzy linguistic term sets by means of the operations intersection and connected union. In addition, in a group decision making framework, hesitant fuzzy linguistic descriptions are defined to manage situations in which decision makers are assessing different alternatives by means of hesitant fuzzy linguistic term sets. Based on the introduced lattice structure, two distances between hesitant fuzzy linguistic descriptions are defined. These metric structures allow distances between decision makers to be computed. A centroid of the decision making group is proposed for each distance to model group representatives in the considered group decision making framework.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Ranking and selection of unsupervised learning marketing segmentation

This research paper has been partially conducted during a three-months visiting period by German Sanchez-Hernandez to the Centre for Computational Intelligence (CCI).NOTICE: this is the author’s version of a work that was accepted for publication in . Changes resulting from the publishing process, such as peer review, editing, corrections, structural formatting, and other quality control mechanisms may not be reflected in this document. Changes may have been made to this work since it was submitted for publication. A definitive version was subsequently published in Knowledge-Based Systems, 44, pp. 20–33 http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.knosys.2013.01.012This paper addresses the problem of choosing the most appropriate classification from a given set of classifications of a set of patterns. This is a relevant topic on unsupervised systems and clustering analysis because different classifications can in general be obtained from the same data set. The provided methodology is based on five fuzzy criteria which are aggregated using an Ordered Weighted Averaging (OWA) operator. To this end, a novel multi-criteria decision making (MCDM) system is defined, which assesses the degree up to which each criterion is met by all classifications. The corresponding single evaluations are then proposed to be aggregated into a collective one by means of an OWA operator guided by a fuzzy linguistic quantifier, which is used to implement the concept of fuzzy majority in the selection process. This new methodology is applied to a real marketing case based on a business to business (B2B) environment to help marketing experts during the segmentation process. As a result, a segmentation containing three segments consisting of 35, 98 and 127 points of sale respectively is selected to be the most suitable to endorse marketing strategies of the firm. Finally, an analysis of the managerial implications of the proposed methodology solution is provided.This work is supported by the SENSORIAL Research Project (TIN2010-20966- C02-01, 02), funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Information Technology

Ultrafast photochemistry produces superbright short-wave infrared dots for low-dose in vivo imaging

12 p.-5 fig.Optical probes operating in the second near-infrared window (NIR-II, 1,000-1,700 nm), where tissues are highly transparent, have expanded the applicability of fluorescence in the biomedical field. NIR-II fluorescence enables deep-tissue imaging with micrometric resolution in animal models, but is limited by the low brightness of NIR-II probes, which prevents imaging at low excitation intensities and fluorophore concentrations. Here, we present a new generation of probes (Ag2S superdots) derived from chemically synthesized Ag2S dots, on which a protective shell is grown by femtosecond laser irradiation. This shell reduces the structural defects, causing an 80-fold enhancement of the quantum yield. PEGylated Ag2S superdots enable deep-tissue in vivo imaging at low excitation intensities (<10 mW cm-2) and doses (<0.5 mg kg-1), emerging as unrivaled contrast agents for NIR-II preclinical bioimaging. These results establish an approach for developing superbright NIR-II contrast agents based on the synergy between chemical synthesis and ultrafast laser processing.Authors thank Dr A. Benayas (CICECO, U. Aveiro, Portugal), Prof G. Lifante and Prof J. García Sole (UAM) for helpful discussions. This work has been founded by Ministerio de Economı́a y Competitividad-MINECO (MAT2017-83111R and MAT2016-75362-C3-1-R) and the Comunidad de Madrid (B2017/BMD-3867 RENIM-CM) co-financed by European Structural and Investment Fund. D.M.-G. thanks UCM-Santander for a predoctoral contract (CT17/17-CT18/17). We thank the staff at the ICTS-National Centre for Electron Microscopy at the UCM for the help in the electron microscopy studies and C.M. at the beamline BL22-CLAESS of the Spanish synchrotron ALBA for his help in the XANES experiments. We also thank J.G.I at the Ultrafast Laser Laboratory at UCM for his help and fruitful discussion. Y.S. acknowledges the support from the China Scholarship Council (CSC File No. 201806870023). Additional funding was provided by the European Commission Horizon 2020 project NanoTBTech, the Fundación para la Investigación Biomédica del Hospital Universitario Ramón y Cajal project IMP18_38 (2018/0265). Ajoy K. Kar and Mark D. Mackenzie acknowledge support from the UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (Project CHAMP, EP/M015130/1). C. Jacinto thanks the financial support of the Brazilian agencies: CNPq (Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico) through the grants: Projeto Universal Nr. 431736/2018-9 and Scholarship in Research Productivity 1C under the Nr. 304967/20181; FINEP (Financiadora de Estudos e Projetos) through the grants INFRAPESQ-11 and INFRAPESQ-12; FAPEAL (Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de Alagoas) grant Nr. 1209/2016. H. D. A. Santos was supported by a graduate studentship from CNPq and by a sandwich doctoral program (PDSE-CAPES) developed at Universidad Autonoma de Madrid, Spain, Project Nr. 88881/2016-01.Peer reviewe

p21 as a Transcriptional Co-Repressor of S-Phase and Mitotic Control Genes

It has been previously described that p21 functions not only as a CDK inhibitor but also as a transcriptional co-repressor in some systems. To investigate the roles of p21 in transcriptional control, we studied the gene expression changes in two human cell systems. Using a human leukemia cell line (K562) with inducible p21 expression and human primary keratinocytes with adenoviral-mediated p21 expression, we carried out microarray-based gene expression profiling. We found that p21 rapidly and strongly repressed the mRNA levels of a number of genes involved in cell cycle and mitosis. One of the most strongly down-regulated genes was CCNE2 (cyclin E2 gene). Mutational analysis in K562 cells showed that the N-terminal region of p21 is required for repression of gene expression of CCNE2 and other genes. Chromatin immunoprecipitation assays indicated that p21 was bound to human CCNE2 and other p21-repressed genes gene in the vicinity of the transcription start site. Moreover, p21 repressed human CCNE2 promoter-luciferase constructs in K562 cells. Bioinformatic analysis revealed that the CDE motif is present in most of the promoters of the p21-regulated genes. Altogether, the results suggest that p21 exerts a repressive effect on a relevant number of genes controlling S phase and mitosis. Thus, p21 activity as inhibitor of cell cycle progression would be mediated not only by the inhibition of CDKs but also by the transcriptional down-regulation of key genes

Finding the most sustainable wind farm sites with a hierarchical outranking decision aiding method

The final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10479-017-2590-4This paper considers the problem of finding suitable sites for wind farms in a region of Catalonia (Spain). The evaluation criteria are structured into a hierarchy that identifies several intermediate sub-goals dealing with different points of view. Therefore, the recent ELECTRE-III-H hierarchical multi-criteria analysis method is proposed as a good solution to help decision-makers. This method establishes an order among the set of possible sites for the wind farms for each sub-goal. ELECTRE-III-H aggregates these orders into an overall order using different parameters. The procedure is based on the construction and exploitation of a pairwise outranking relation, following the principles of concordance (i.e. majority rule) and discordance (i.e. respect for the minority opinions). This paper makes two main contributions. First, it contributes to the ELECTRE-III-H method by studying its mathematical properties for the construction of outranking relations. Second, the case study is solved and its results show that we can effectively represent and manage the overall influence of the various criteria on the global result at different levels of the hierarchy. The paper compares different scenarios with strict, normal, and optimistic preference, indifference and veto thresholds. Results show that the best site differs for technical, economic, environmental, and social intermediate criteria. Therefore, the best overall solution changes depending on the preference and veto thresholds fixed at the intermediate level of the hierarchy.Peer Reviewe