Three-way Decisions with Evaluative Linguistic Expressions

The theory of three-way decisions (TWD) divides a finite and non-empty universe into three disjoint sets, which are called positive, negative, and boundary regions. These regions respectively induce positive, negative, and boundary rules: a positive rule makes a decision of acceptance, a negative rule makes a decision of rejection, and a boundary rule makes an abstained or non-committed decision [1, 2]. The concept of three-way decisions was originally introduced in Rough Set Theory [1, 3] and until today, it has been widely studied and applied to many decision-making problems (see [4, 5, 6, 7] for some examples). Thus, several approaches have been proposed to generate the three regions; one of them is based on probabilistic rough sets, which generalizes probabilistic rough sets [8, 9] where the three regions are constructed using a pair of thresholds and the notion of conditional probability (in this case, the regions are called probabilistic positive, negative, and boundary regions). The contribution of this article is to provide a linguistic interpretation of the positive, negative, and boundary regions.