Decision making in real-life scenarios may often be modeled as an optimization problem. It requires the consideration of various attributes like human preferences and thinking, which constrain achieving the optimal value of the problem objectives. The value of the objectives may be maximized or minimized, depending on the situation. Numerous times, the values of these problem parameters are in linguistic form, as human beings naturally understand and express themselves using words. These problems are therefore termed as linguistic optimization problems (LOPs), and are of two types, namely single objective linguistic optimization problems (SOLOPs) and multi-objective linguistic optimization problems (MOLOPs). In these LOPs, the value of the objective function(s) may not be known at all points of the decision space, and therefore, the objective function(s) as well as problem constraints are linked by the if-then rules. Tsukamoto inference method has been used to solve these LOPs; however, it suffers from drawbacks. As, the use of linguistic information inevitably calls for the utilization of computing with words (CWW), and therefore, 2-tuple linguistic model based solution methodologies were proposed for LOPs. However, we found that 2-tuple linguistic model based solution methodologies represent the semantics of the linguistic information using a combination of type-1 fuzzy sets and ordinal term sets. As, the semantics of linguistic information are best modeled using the interval type-2 fuzzy sets, hence we propose solution methodologies for LOPs based on CWW approach of perceptual computing, in this paper. The perceptual computing based solution methodologies use a novel design of CWW engine, called the perceptual reasoning (PR). PR in the current form is suitable for solving SOLOPs and, hence, we have also extended it to the MOLOPs.

Computing with words (CWW) has emerged as a powerful tool for processing the linguistic information, especially the one generated by human beings. Various CWW approaches have emerged since the inception of CWW, such as perceptual computing, extension principle based CWW approach, symbolic method based CWW approach, and 2-tuple based CWW approach. Furthermore, perceptual computing can use interval approach (IA), enhanced interval approach (EIA), or Hao-Mendel approach (HMA), for data processing. There have been numerous works in which HMA was shown to be better at word modelling than EIA, and EIA better than IA. But, a deeper study of these works reveals that HMA captures lesser fuzziness than the EIA or IA. Thus, we feel that EIA is more suited for word modelling in multi-person systems and HMA for single-person systems (as EIA is an improvement over IA). Furthermore, another set of works, compared the performances perceptual computing to the other above said CWW approaches. In all these works, perceptual computing was shown to be better than other CWW approaches. However, none of the works tried to investigate the reason behind this observed better performance of perceptual computing. Also, no comparison has been performed for scenarios where the inputs are differentially weighted. Thus, the aim of this work is to empirically establish that EIA is suitable for multi-person systems and HMA for single-person systems. Another dimension of this work is also to empirically prove that perceptual computing gives better performance than other CWW approaches based on extension principle, symbolic method and 2-tuple especially in scenarios where inputs are differentially weighted.

Several outbreak prediction models for COVID-19 are being used by officials around the world to make informed-decisions and enforce relevant control measures. Among the standard models for COVID-19 global pandemic prediction, simple epidemiological and statistical models have received more attention by authorities, and they are popular in the media. Due to a high level of uncertainty and lack of essential data, standard models have shown low accuracy for long-term prediction. Although the literature includes several attempts to address this issue, the essential generalization and robustness abilities of existing models needs to be improved. This paper presents a comparative analysis of machine learning and soft computing models to predict the COVID-19 outbreak as an alternative to SIR and SEIR models.

In relational approach to general rough sets, ideas of directed relations are supplemented with additional conditions for multiple algebraic approaches in this research paper. The relations are also specialized to representations of general parthood that are upper-directed, reflexive and antisymmetric for a better behaved groupoidal semantics over the set of roughly equivalent objects by the first author. Another distinct algebraic semantics over the set of approximations, and a new knowledge interpretation are also invented in this research by her. Because of minimal conditions imposed on the relations, neighborhood granulations are used in the construction of all approximations (granular and pointwise). Necessary and sufficient conditions for the lattice of local upper approximations to be completely distributive are proved by the second author. These results are related to formal concept analysis. Applications to student centered learning and decision making are also outlined.

Information granules have been considered to be the fundamental constructs of Granular Computing (GrC). As a useful unsupervised learning technique, Fuzzy C-Means (FCM) is one of the most frequently used methods to construct information granules. The FCM-based granulation-degranulation mechanism plays a pivotal role in GrC. In this paper, to enhance the quality of the degranulation (reconstruction) process, we augment the FCM-based degranulation mechanism by introducing a vector of fuzzification factors (fuzzification factor vector) and setting up an adjustment mechanism to modify the prototypes and the partition matrix. The design is regarded as an optimization problem, which is guided by a reconstruction criterion. In the proposed scheme, the initial partition matrix and prototypes are generated by the FCM. Then a fuzzification factor vector is introduced to form an appropriate fuzzification factor for each cluster to build up an adjustment scheme of modifying the prototypes and the partition matrix. With the supervised learning mode of the granulation-degranulation process, we construct a composite objective function of the fuzzification factor vector, the prototypes and the partition matrix. Subsequently, the particle swarm optimization (PSO) is employed to optimize the fuzzification factor vector to refine the prototypes and develop the optimal partition matrix. Finally, the reconstruction performance of the FCM algorithm is enhanced. We offer a thorough analysis of the developed scheme. In particular, we show that the classical FCM algorithm forms a special case of the proposed scheme. Experiments completed for both synthetic and publicly available datasets show that the proposed approach outperforms the generic data reconstruction approach.

My friend Robert John, professor of computer science at the University of Nottingham, who has died of liver cancer aged 64, pioneered the use of "type-2 fuzzy sets" in computational intelligence, to establish ways of reasoning algorithmically about linguistic concepts that involve uncertainty – something humans are good at, but computers are not. In the 1990s, while Rob (as he was known to family, though called Bob by work colleagues) was working at De Montfort University, he became involved in research into solving a community transport scheduling problem using fuzzy logic. Working from the foundations laid by Prof Lotfi Zadeh, Rob, through his PhD in 2000 and subsequent work with Prof Jerry Mendel and others, developed the mathematical techniques to use type-2 fuzzy sets. Two papers on type-2 and interval type-2 that he wrote with Mendel are among the most frequently cited and influential in the world on the topic. Rob was a founder member in 1995 of the Centre for Computational Intelligence at De Montfort and led its growth through the 2000s, established his reputation in the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers' conferences and in journals on fuzzy logic, and was promoted over time to deputy dean.

Log-based predictive maintenance of computing centers is a main concern regarding the worldwide computing grid that supports the CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research) physics experiments. A log, as event-oriented adhoc information, is quite often given as unstructured big data. Log data processing is a time-consuming computational task. The goal is to grab essential information from a continuously changeable grid environment to construct a classification model. Evolving granular classifiers are suited to learn from time-varying log streams and, therefore, perform online classification of the severity of anomalies. We formulated a 4-class online anomaly classification problem, and employed time windows between landmarks and two granular computing methods, namely, Fuzzy-set-Based evolving Modeling (FBeM) and evolving Granular Neural Network (eGNN), to model and monitor logging activity rate. The results of classification are of utmost importance for predictive maintenance because priority can be given to specific time intervals in which the classifier indicates the existence of high or medium severity anomalies.

Here, we propose an unsupervised fuzzy rule-based dimensionality reduction method primarily for data visualization. It considers the following important issues relevant to dimensionality reduction-based data visualization: (i) preservation of neighborhood relationships, (ii) handling data on a non-linear manifold, (iii) the capability of predicting projections for new test data points, (iv) interpretability of the system, and (v) the ability to reject test points if required. For this, we use a first-order Takagi-Sugeno type model. We generate rule antecedents using clusters in the input data. In this context, we also propose a new variant of the Geodesic c-means clustering algorithm. We estimate the rule parameters by minimizing an error function that preserves the inter-point geodesic distances (distances over the manifold) as Euclidean distances on the projected space. We apply the proposed method on three synthetic and three real-world data sets and visually compare the results with four other standard data visualization methods. The obtained results show that the proposed method behaves desirably and performs better than or comparable to the methods compared with. The proposed method is found to be robust to the initial conditions. The predictability of the proposed method for test points is validated by experiments. We also assess the ability of our method to reject output points when it should. Then, we extend this concept to provide a general framework for learning an unsupervised fuzzy model for data projection with different objective functions. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt to manifold learning using unsupervised fuzzy modeling.

Satirical news detection is an important yet challenging task to prevent spread of misinformation. Many feature based and end-to-end neural nets based satirical news detection systems have been proposed and delivered promising results. Existing approaches explore comprehensive word features from satirical news articles, but lack semantic metrics using word vectors for tweet form satirical news. Moreover, the vagueness of satire and news parody determines that a news tweet can hardly be classified with a binary decision, that is, satirical or legitimate. To address these issues, we collect satirical and legitimate news tweets, and propose a semantic feature based approach. Features are extracted by exploring inconsistencies in phrases, entities, and between main and relative clauses. We apply game-theoretic rough set model to detect satirical news, in which probabilistic thresholds are derived by game equilibrium and repetition learning mechanism. Experimental results on the collected dataset show the robustness and improvement of the proposed approach compared with Pawlak rough set model and SVM.

The process of information fusion needs to deal with a large number of uncertain information with multi-source, heterogeneity, inaccuracy, unreliability, and incompleteness. In practical engineering applications, Dempster-Shafer evidence theory is widely used in multi-source information fusion owing to its effectiveness in data fusion. Information sources have an important impact on multi-source information fusion in an environment of complex, unstable, uncertain, and incomplete characteristics. To address multi-source information fusion problem, this paper considers the situation of uncertain information modeling from the closed world to the open world assumption and studies the generation of basic probability assignment (BPA) with incomplete information. In this paper, a new method is proposed to generate generalized basic probability assignment (GBPA) based on the triangular fuzzy number model under the open world assumption. The proposed method can not only be used in different complex environments simply and flexibly, but also have less information loss in information processing. Finally, a series of comprehensive experiments basing on the UCI data sets are used to verify the rationality and superiority of the proposed method.