Journal of Intelligent & Fuzzy Systems: Applications in Engineering and Technology

This study presents a possible relationship between two main objects, which are three-dimensional copulas (3D-Cs) and geometric picture fuzzy numbers (GPFNs). This opens up a potential field for future studies for these two objects that three-dimensional copulas can become useful tools for handling uncertainty information in the form of a picture fuzzy set (PFS). Specifically, we define a GPFN as a base element of the PFS and a defined domain of three-dimensional copulas that contains a set of GPFNs, then we show some examples of three-dimensional copulas identified on this domain. In this framework, we present the theorems related to these two objects. At the same time, we provide some examples for three-dimensional semi-copulas, three-dimensional quasi-copulas, and three-dimensional empirical copulas defined on D, which is a defined domain of a three-dimensional copula and contains a set of GPFNs D g * . In addition, we also introduce a new approach to non-linear programming problems.

In this paper, notions of L-interval spaces and L-2-arity convex spaces are introduced. It is showed that there is a Galois’s connection between the category of L-convex spaces and the category of L-interval spaces. In particular, the category of L-2-arity convex spaces can be embedded in the category of L-interval spaces as a coreflective subcategory. Further, some properties of L-interval spaces are introduced including L-geometric (resp. L-Peano, L-Pasch and L-sand-glass) property. It is proved that an L-2-arity convex space is an L-JHC convex space iff its segment operator has L-Peano property. It is also proved that an L-JHC convex space with an L-idempotent segment operator has L-sand-glass property. Further, it is also proved that an L-idempotent interval space having L-Peano+L-Pasch property has L-geometric property and L-sand-glass property.

This paper considers a two-stage supply chain consisting of one manufacturer and one retailer, exploring the impact of the fuzzy uncertainty of product yield and demand and the deciders’ risk attitudes on the optimal order quantity of the retailer. At the same time, this study tries to analyze the coordination problem in the two-stage supply chain with consideration of the retailer and the manufacturer’s risk attitudes. Firstly, this study develops a supply chain optimal decision model in a centralized decision framework. In the proposed model, the L-R fuzzy numbers are used to depict the yield and demand with fuzzy characteristics. Then, the coordination of quantity discount in a supply chain is studied. Consequently, this research further investigates a special case in which the market demand and yield are assumed to be triangular fuzzy numbers, and the optimal solution of the order quantity and the wholesale price are obtained. At last, this paper utilizes several numerical examples to validate the proposed model. The results show that the quantity discount contract can coordinate the supply chain in a fuzzy environment, and the optimal order quantity decreases with the increasing of the risk bias coefficient of the retailer and the manufacturer. It also suggests that risk-seeking retailer will order more products, in addition, the manufacturer tend to choose a risk-seeking retailer as partner and the retailer is more likely to choose a risk-seeking rather than risk-aversion manufacturer as partner.

Genetic algorithm is one of data mining classification techniques and it has been applied successfully in a wide range of applications. However, the performance of Genetic algorithm fluctuates significantly. This research work combines Genetic algorithm with fuzzy logic to adapt dynamically crossover and mutation parameters of Genetic algorithm. Two different datasets are taken during the experiment. Several experiments have been performed to prove the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm. Results show that the rules generated from a proposed algorithm are significantly better with high fitness and more efficient as compared to a normal Genetic algorithm.

 We present a novel graph cut method for iterated segmentation of objects with specific shape bias (SBGC). In contrast with conventional graph cut models which emphasize the regional appearance only, the proposed SBGC takes the shape preference of the interested object into account to drive the segmentation. Therefore, the SBGC can ensure a more accurate convergence to the interested object even in complicated conditions where the appearance cues are inadequate for object/background discrimination. In particular, we firstly evaluate the segmentation by simultaneously considering its global shape and local edge consistencies with the object shape priors. Then these two cues are formulated into a graph cut framework to seek the optimal segmentation that maximizing both of the global and local measurements. By iteratively implementing the optimization, the proposed SBGC can achieve joint estimation of the optimal segmentation and the most likely object shape encoded by the shape priors, and eventually converge to the candidate result with maximum consistency between these two estimations. Finally, we take the ellipse shape objects with various segmentation challenges as examples for evaluation. Competitive results compared with state-of-the-art methods validate the effectiveness of the technique.

According to the characteristics of the tool hydraulic control system of the double cutters experimental pplatform, intelligent control methodology forecasted by fuzzy neural network is introduced into the control system. The two level control systems of fuzzy neural network predictive control and fuzzy control are designed. The fuzzy neural network predictive controller mainly completes the analysis and control of the speed and pressure in the tool hydraulic system. The speed control signal and pressure control signal from the first level are output to the fuzzy controller. Then, through logical reasoning, the control signal is output and the actuator is driven by the fuzzy controller to complete the control function of the tool system. In this paper, compared with the traditional PID control, the fuzzy neural network predictive control technology has better control accuracy, dynamic response performance and steady-state accuracy. The fuzzy neural network predictive control technology can be used to control the tool hydraulic system of Tunnel Boring Machine.

The resourceful mobile devices with augmented capabilities around human pave the way for utilizing it as delegators for resource-constrained devices to run compute-intensive applications. Such collaborative resource sharing policy among mobile devices throws challenges like identifying competent alternatives for offloading and diminishing time consumption of pre-offload process to accomplish remarkable offloading. This paper presents a Mobile Cloud Computing framework with Predictive Context-Aware Collaborative Offloading Process (PCA-COP) that fixes these challenges through conductive alternative discovery. This context-aware discovery adapts a multi-criteria decision making model of Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) accompanied with Fuzzy categorization to rank the alternatives and classify them into Highly, Fairly, Less offload-suitable devices. Moreover, to make alternative selection optimal, a Dataset Curtailment enabled Artificial Neural Network (DCANN) prediction is incorporated on AHP-Fuzzy model, which truncates training dataset using Conditioned Stratified Sampling (CSS). The prototype framework is evaluated with mobile applications in the classroom under dynamic context environments.

Theoretical concepts of graphs are highly utilized by computer science applications. Especially in research areas of computer science such as data mining, image segmentation, clustering, image capturing and networking. The cubic graphs are more flexible and compatible than fuzzy graphs due to the fact that they have many applications in networks. In this paper, we define the direct product, strong product, and degree of a vertex in cubic graphs and investigate some of their properties. Likewise, we introduce the notion of complete cubic graphs and present some properties of self complementary cubic graphs. Finally, We present fuzzy cubic organizational model as an example of cubic digraph in decision support system.

China has attracted the attention of the world owing its significant economic achievements, which are supported significantly by its booming industry. However, the issues of energy and pollutants have severely challenged the sustainability of the industry. The efficiency measurement is the premise intended to realize sustainability within the Chinese industry. Because the industry is a complex production system, there exists uncertainties and fuzziness regarding its inputs and outputs. This study proposes the application of an interval to describe these fuzzy data and employ the Enhanced Russell Measure to assess the performance of the Chinese industry, accounting for undesirable output such as pollution. In addition, for the ranking between interval efficiencies, a novel ranking approach based on the holistic acceptability of a possibility degree is proposed. The proposed method provides advice and guidance for decision makers to make appropriate and effective policies to balance industrial development and environmental protection in spite of uncertain and fuzzy data.

This study introduces computerized model for evaluation of corporate performance for companies traded in the main world stock markets. The main contribution of this study is to utilize a “Soft Regression” modeling tool, which is a soft computing tool based on fuzzy logic in financial statement analysis. Specifically, the tool is used to identify the most important financial ratios explaining the performance (as reflected by Operating Income Margin) of publicly traded companies, belonging to the manufacturing industries 2000–3999. We used data extracted from the XBRL database for years 2012 to 2016.

The main results and conclusions of the study are:

The study identified relevant financial ratios for the manufacturing industry. It also revealed the relative importance of the various categories of financial ratios.

The main contribution of this study is to present a soft computing modeling tool based on fuzzy logic which is intuitive, stable and not based on restrictive assumptions.

Z⁺-numbers, which carry more information than Z-numbers, are studied in this paper. Based on existed models, two more scientific and reasonable probability models of Z⁺-numbers are developed. In order to utilize Z⁺-numbers to solve practical problems, the α-cut set of Z⁺-numbers and corresponding utility function are proposed. Meanwhile, according to the structure of Z⁺-numbers, the entropy, cross-entropy and comprehensive cross-entropy are introduced to measure the uncertainty and fuzziness of Z⁺-numbers information. Furthermore, a linear programming model based on proposed three kinds of entropy is designed to obtain the weight vector of criteria in decision-making problems. Finally, we provide an example by selecting an optimal design of electricity vehicles charge station(DEVCS) combined the PROMETHEE method with Z⁺-numbers, and the feasibility of the proposed method are verified.

In this paper, based on generalized residuated lattices as an extension of Zhang’s complete residuated lattices, there are two types of structures: bi-partially orders, right (left) joins, right (left) complete lattices and right (left) Alexandrov topologies. We investigate their properties and the relationship between them. Moreover, monotone maps, right (left)-embedding maps and right-join (left-join) preserving maps are investigated with various operations as extensions of Zadeh powerset operations between these structures. As the foundation of fuzzy rough sets and fuzzy contexts, there exist adjunctions and Galois connections between maps from right(left) Alexandrov topologies to right(left) Alexandrov topologies. We give their examples.

Blind Source Separation(BSS) is one of the research hotspots in the field of signal processing. In order to improve the accuracy of speech recognition in driving environment, the driver’s speech signal must be enhanced to improve its signal to noise ratio(SNR). Independent component analysis (ICA) algorithm is the most classical and efficient blind statistical signal processing technique. Compared with other improved ICA algorithms, fixed-point algorithm (FastICA) is well known for its fast convergence speed and good robustness. However, the convergence of FastICA algorithm is comparatively susceptible to the initial value selection of the original demixing matrix and the calculation of the iterative process is relatively large. In this paper, the gradient descent method is used to reduce the effect of initial value. What’s more, the improved secant method is proposed to speed up the convergence rate and reduce the amount of computation. As the results of mixed speech separation experiment turn out, the improved algorithm is of better performance relative to the standard FastICA algorithm. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm improves the speech quality of the target driver. It is suitable for speech separation in driving environment with low SNR.

Nowadays, Industries have been receiving much attention in Failure modelling and reliability assessment of repairable systems due to the fact that it plays a crucial role in risk and safety management of process. The primary purpose of this article is to present a methodology for discussing uncertainty in the reliability assessment if the production system. In fact, we discuss the fuzzy E-Bayesian estimation of reliability for PVC window production system. This approach is used to create the fuzzy E-Bayesian estimations of system reliability by introducing and applying a theorem called “Resolution Identity” for fuzzy sets. To be more specific, the model parameters are assumed to be fuzzy random variables. For this purpose, the original problem is transformed into a nonlinear programming problem which is divided into four sub-problems to simplify the computations. Finally, the results obtained for the sub-problems can be used to determine the membership functions of the fuzzy E-Bayesian estimation of system reliability. To clarify the proposed model, a practical example for PVC window production system is conducted.

In last few years, lots of researchers have proposed different methods to solve the constrained matrix games with fuzzy payoffs. In this paper, it has been shown that the mathematical programming problem of constrained matrix games with fuzzy payoffs, considered by researchers, is mathematically invalid and hence the method, proposed by researchers to obtain the complete solution (minimum expected gain of Player I, maximum expected loss of Player II and their corresponding optimal strategies) of constrained matrix games with fuzzy payoffs by solving the mathematical programming problem with fuzzy payoffs, are also invalid. Further, in the present paper, a new method has been proposed to find the complete solution of matrix games with fuzzy payoffs. To illustrate the proposed method, some existing numerical problems of constrained matrix games with fuzzy payoffs have been solved by the proposed method.

The multi-agent collaborative hunting problem is a typical problem in multi-agent coordination and collaboration research. Aiming at the multi-agent hunting problem with learning ability, a collaborative hunt method based on game theory and Q-learning is proposed. Firstly, a cooperative hunting team is established and a game model of cooperative hunting is built. Secondly, through the learning of the escaper’s strategy choice, the trajectory of the escaper’s limited T-step cumulative reward is established, and the trajectory is adjusted to the hunter’s strategy set. Finally, the Nash equilibrium solution is obtained by solving the cooperative hunt game, and each hunter executes the equilibrium strategy to complete the hunt task. C# simulation experiment shows that under the same conditions, this method can effectively solve the hunting problem of a single runaway with learning ability in the obstacle environment, and the comparative analysis of experimental data shows that the efficiency of this method is better than other methods.

In many cases, complex problems cannot be accurately described by precise numerical values. Fuzzy theory provides a suitable tool for solving these problems. However, if decision makers cannot reach an agreement on the method for defining linguistic variables based on fuzzy sets, TIVFNs (triangular interval-valued fuzzy numbers) can provide more accurate modeling. Therefore, solving fuzzy MCGDM (multiple criteria group decision-making) problem with an unknown expert weight and criterion weight in TIVFNs has become an important research direction. In this paper, TIVF-VIKOR (triangular interval-valued fuzzy VIKOR) method, which is suitable for the environment of TIVFNs, is proposed to solve the problem of fuzzy MCGDM. To achieve this goal, the TIVF-VIKOR method is innovatively adopted similarity and coefficient of variation are combined to calculate expert weight, and deviation maximization method based on divergence matrix is used to calculate criterion weight. VIKOR method is used to find the compromise solutions, which are converted into the form of binary connection number, and the optimal compromise solution is obtained after ranking. The proposed method is applied to the problem of machine fault detection, and the validity and feasibility of the method are illustrated. Compared with the TOPSIS∖ELECTRE method, the ranking results of the three methods are equivalent, and the fluctuation of the TIVF-VIKOR method is more distinct.

In the real multi-criteria group decision making (MCGDM) problems, there will be an interactive relationship among different decision makers (DMs). To identify the overall influence, we define the Shapley value as the DM’s weight. Entropy is a measure which makes it better than similarity measures to recognize a group decision making problem. Since we propose a relative entropy to measure the difference between two systems, which improves the accuracy of the distance measure.In this paper, a MCGDM approach named as TODIM is presented under q-rung orthopair fuzzy information.The proposed TODIM approach is developed for correlative MCGDM problems, in which the weights of the DMs are calculated in terms of Shapley values and the dominance matrices are evaluated based on relative entropy measure with q-rung orthopair fuzzy information.Furthermore, the efficacy of the proposed Gq-ROFWA operator and the novel TODIM is demonstrated through a selection problem of modern enterprises risk investment. A comparative analysis with existing methods is presented to validate the efficiency of the approach.

In this paper, we introduce the notion of Galois and dual Galois connections as a topological viewpoint of concept lattices in a complete residuated lattice. Under various relations, we investigate the Galois and dual Galois connections on Alexandrov L-topologies. Moreover, their properties and examples are investigated.

This paper aims to investigate the compensation contract design problem consisting of a risk neutral firm and two risk averse workers with and without helping effort in the presence of bilateral moral hazard by Stackelberg game in the framework of principal-agent theory. Three classes of contract models are established in three modes, which reflect whether helping effort takes place between both workers and whether personal performance evaluation contract or relative performance evaluation contract is applied by the firm. By solving models, optimal efforts of the firm, optimal individual and workgroup incentive coefficients, optimal personal effort and helping effort, and the firm’s expected profit are deduced in different modes. In addition, a numerical experiment is investigated by focusing on the impacts of effort cost coefficients of the firm and the worker, and bilateral moral hazard on optimal compensation contracts and profit of the firm in three modes, which provide some valuable management insights about optimal strategy for the firm.

The main findings show that the relative performance evaluation contract works better than the personal performance evaluation contract when the two workers is cooperative, which means that helping effort takes place between the two workers. Furthermore, a higher marginal contribution can motive the worker to make more helping effort for her partner, thus achieving win-win outcome based on the relationship of cooperation. For the firm, the optimal strategy is to design the relative performance evaluation contract for both workers and motivate them to make cooperative relationship by exerting helping effort under bilateral moral hazard. Moreover, bilateral moral hazard decreases the motivations of the workers but increases the firm’s profit. This proposed work contributes to the investigation of compensation contract design by combining three critical factors, that is, multiple agents, bilateral moral hazard, and helping effort. The findings provide some theoretical guidance on how to set up optimal mechanism between the firm and multiple agents in the presence of bilateral moral hazard and how to reduce the adverse influence of bilateral moral hazard on participants’ profits.

An information system as a database that stands for relationships between objects and attributes is an important mathematical model. An image information system is an information system where each of its information values is an image and its information structures embody internal features of this type of information system. Uncertainty measurement is an effective tool for evaluation. This paper explores measures of uncertainty for an information system by using the proposed information structures. The distance between two objects in an image information system is first given. After that, the fuzzy T _cos -equivalence relation, induced by this system by using Gaussian kernel method, is obtained, where Gaussian kernel is based on this distance. Next, information structures of this system are described by set vectors, dependence between information structures is studied and properties of information structures are given by using inclusion degree, and application for information structures and uncertainty measures of an image information system are investigated by the information structures. Moreover, effectiveness analysis is done to show the feasibility of the proposed measures from the angle of statistics. Finally, an application of the proposed measurement for attribute reduction is given. These results will be helpful for understanding the essence of uncertainty in an image information system.

BP (Back Propagation) neural network has been widely applied for classification tasks including road condition evaluation, however, BP model has the problem of lower accuracy and slow convergence rate. A novel road condition evaluation method based on BA-BP (Bat-Back Propagation) algorithm is proposed for the unstructured small road condition evaluation, which filled the vacancy of specific small road scenes. Firstly, five kinds of road condition features including roughness, curvature, obstacle width to height ratio, obstacle effective area ratio, obstacle coefficient are defined and extracted. Then obstacles from region of interest (ROI) in front of the vehicle are analyzed. Finally, Bat algorithm is used to optimize the searching of initial network weights and thresholds, which obtained a higher accuracy of 95.15% and efficient training process. Comparison experiments showed that the proposed approach improved the accuracy with 5.31%, 3.32%, 3.17% than the BP, GA-BP and FA-BP model, respectively. As for the processing time of collected road data, BA-BP network consumed less time of 2 s and 3.9 s compared with GA-BP and FA-BP. Proposed method also outperformed than most of the state-of-the-art approaches with higher accuracy and simpler hardware environments, which proved its potential of being popularized in large scale real-time systems.

This article describes the use of the Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient network, a deep reinforcement learning algorithm, for mobile robot navigation. The neural network structure has as inputs laser range findings, angular and linear velocities of the robot, and position and orientation of the mobile robot with respect to a goal position. The outputs of the network will be the angular and linear velocities used as control signals for the robot. The experiments demonstrated that deep reinforcement learning’s techniques that uses continuous actions, are efficient for decision-making in a mobile robot. Nevertheless, the design of the reward functions constitutes an important issue in the performance of deep reinforcement learning algorithms. In order to show the performance of the Deep Reinforcement Learning algorithm, we have applied successfully the proposed architecture in simulated environments and in experiments with a real robot.

Whale Optimization Algorithm (WOA) is a relatively novel algorithm in the field of meta-heuristic algorithms. WOA can reveal an efficient performance compared with other well-established optimization algorithms, but there is still a problem of premature convergence and easy to fall into local optimal in complex multimodal functions, so this paper presents an improved WOA, and proposes the random hopping update strategy and random control parameter strategy to improve the exploration and exploitation ability of WOA. In this paper, 24 well-known benchmark functions are used to test the algorithm, including 10 unimodal functions and 14 multimodal functions. The experimental results show that the convergence accuracy of the proposed algorithm is better than that of the original algorithm on 21 functions, and better than that of the other 5 algorithms on 23 functions.

The emergency supply of transboundary water resources is a prominent problem affecting the social and economic development of basin countries. However, current water supply decisions on transboundary water resources may ignore the psychological perception of multi-stakeholders, and the evolution of emergencies increases the uncertainty of decision making. Both factors would lead to the low acceptance of water-related decisions. Utility satisfaction, perceived losses, and quantity satisfaction were selected in this paper to identify the perceived satisfaction of upstream governments, downstream governments, and the public, respectively, over multiple decision-making stages. A modeling framework combining prospect theory and the multi-stage multi-objective programming methodology was then developed to measure the perceived satisfaction of different stakeholders in a watershed under emergency. A two-stage NSGA-II and TOPSIS based approach was adopted to find the optimal compromise solution to solve the model. The framework was applied in the Lancang–Mekong River basin to provide suggestions to decision makers. Upstream decision makers must choose a moderate proportional fairness degree when making emergency decisions to maximize the perceived satisfaction of all stakeholders. Meanwhile, the perceived loss of downstream countries with low water demand should be considered first in the formulation of emergency water supply plans. Furthermore, although water supply from upstream countries can improve perceived water quantity satisfaction of downstream publics, additional actions must still be taken to change the traditional concepts of the public.

Under demand response enabled demand-side management, the home energy management (HEM) schemes schedule appliances for balancing both energy and demand within a residence. This scheme enables the user to achieve either a minimum electricity bill (EB) or maximum comfort. There is always the added burden on a HEM scheme to obtain the least possible EB with comfort. However, if a time window that contains comfortable time slots of the day for an appliance operation, is identified, and if the cost-effective schedule-pattern gets generated from these windows autonomously, then the burden can be reduced. Therefore, this paper proposes a two-level method that can assist the HEM scheme by generating a cost-effective schedule-pattern for scheduling home appliances. The first level uses a classifier to identify the comfortable time window from past ON and OFF events. The second level uses pattern generation algorithms to generate a cost-effective schedule-pattern from the identified window. The generated cost-effective schedule-pattern is applied to a HEM scheme as input to demonstrate the proposed two-level approach. The simulation results exhibit that the proposed approach helps the HEM scheme to schedule home appliances cost-effectively with a satisfactory user-comfort between 90% and 100%.

This paper presents a Fractional Fourier transform based reversible data hiding technique to secure the data transmitted over communication network. The proposed algorithm modifies the cover image to improve the robustness of data hiding technique. The cover image is transformed using Fractional Fourier Transform (FrFT) into a time-frequency domain and the optimal pixel locations for hiding the secret data are found using firefly algorithm. Firefly algorithm uses multi-objective function, which is a combination of Structural Similarity Index Measure (SSIM) and Bit Error rate (BER). The histogram shifting technique embeds secret data in the optimal pixel locations. The quality of test images is analyzed under varying payload as well as under varying fractional order. Experimental results conclude that this scheme produces good quality stego image. It has also been found from the simulation results that the proposed algorithm is more robust and reversible against various attacks as it provides lower bit error rate and higher normalization coefficient.

This paper presents one method and one hybrid genetic algorithm for multi-depot open vehicle routing problem with fuzzy time windows (MDOVRPFTW) without maximum time windows. For the method, the degree of customers’ willingness to accept goods (DCWAG) is firstly proposed, it’s one fuzzy vague and determines maximum time windows. Referring to methods to determine fuzzy membership function, the function between DCWAG and the starting service time is constructed. By setting an threshold for DCWAG, the starting service time that the threshold corresponds can be treated as the maximum time window, which meets the actual situation. The goal of the model is to minimize the total cost. For the algorithm, MDOVRPFTW without maximum time windows is an extension of the NP-hard problem, the hybrid genetic algorithm was designed, which is combination of genetic algorithm and Hungarian algorithm. When the hybrid genetic algorithm applied to one pharmaceutical logistics company in Beijing City, China, one optimal scheme is determined. Then the rationality and the stability of solutions by the hybrid genetic algorithm are proved. Finally, sensitivity analyses are performed to investigate the impact of someone factor on DCWAG and some suggestions are proposed.

In fuzzy set theory, fuzzy convex structures are important mathematical structures. In this paper, we focus on separation axioms in fuzzy convex spaces. Concretely, we introduce S₀, S₁ and S₂ separation axioms in fuzzy convex spaces and establish their relationships. Furthermore, we investigate their hereditary and productive properties.

When dealing with multi-objective optimization, the proportion of non-dominated solutions increase rapidly with the increase of optimization objective. Pareto-dominance-based algorithms suffer the low selection pressure towards the true Pareto front. Decomposition-based algorithms may fail to solve the problems with highly irregular Pareto front. Based on the analysis of the two selection mechanism, a dynamic reference-vector-based many-objective evolutionary algorithm(RMaEA) is proposed. Adaptive-adjusted reference vector is used to improve the distribution of the algorithm in global area, and the improved non-dominated relationship is used to improve the convergence in a certain local area. Compared with four state-of-art algorithms on DTLZ benchmark with 5-, 10- and 15-objective, the proposed algorithm obtains 13 minimum mean IGD values and 8 minimum standard deviations among 15 test problem.

 With respect to multiple attribute group decision making problems in which the attribute weights and the expert weights take the form of real numbers and the attribute values take the form of interval-valued uncertain linguistic variable. In this paper, we introduce the idea of variable precision into the incomplete interval-valued fuzzy information system and propose the theory of variable precision rough sets over incomplete interval-valued fuzzy information systems. Then, we give the properties of rough approximation operators and study the knowledge discovery and attribute reduction in the incomplete interval-valued fuzzy information system under the condition that a certain degree of misclassification rate is allowed to exist. Furthermore, a decision rule and decision model are given. Finally, an illustrative example is given and compared with the existing methods, the practicability and effectiveness of this method are further verified.

In the field of security, the data labels are unknown or the labels are too expensive to label, so that clustering methods are used to detect the threat behavior contained in the big data. The most widely used probabilistic clustering model is Gaussian Mixture Models(GMM), which is flexible and powerful to apply prior knowledge for modelling the uncertainty of the data. Therefore, in this paper, we use GMM to build the threat behavior detection model. Commonly, Expectation Maximization (EM) and Variational Inference (VI) are used to estimate the optimal parameters of GMM. However, both EM and VI are quite sensitive to the initial values of the parameters. Therefore, we propose to use Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) to initialize the parameters. Firstly, SVD is used to factorize the data set matrix to get the singular value matrix and singular matrices. Then we calculate the number of the components of GMM by the first two singular values in the singular value matrix and the dimension of the data. Next, other parameters of GMM, such as the mixing coefficients, the mean and the covariance, are calculated based on the number of the components. After that, the initialization values of the parameters are input into EM and VI to estimate the optimal parameters of GMM. The experiment results indicate that our proposed method performs well on the parameters initialization of GMM clustering using EM and VI for estimating parameters.

The probabilistic linguistic term sets (PLTSs) are widely used in decision-making, due to its convenience of evaluation, and allowances of probability information. However, there are still some cases where it is not convenient to give an evaluation using the PLTS gramma. Sometimes the evaluators can only give a comparative relationship between alternatives, sometimes evaluators may have difficulty understanding all the alternatives and cannot give a complete assessment. Therefore, we propose a method to transform the comparative linguistic expressions (CLEs) into PLTSs, and the comparison objects of CLEs are alternatives evaluated by PLTSs. And the probability distribution has been adjusted to make the transformation more in line with common sense. Then, a method to correct the deviation is proposed, allowing alternatives to be compared in the case of incomplete assessment. Combining the above two methods, we propose a decision-making method when both CLEs and incomplete assessments coexist. With the study in this paper, the limitations of PLTS-based evaluation and decision-making are reduced and the flexibility of using PLTS is improved.

The condensed nearest neighbor (CNN) is a pioneering instance selection algorithm for 1-nearest neighbor. Many variants of CNN for K-nearest neighbor have been proposed by different researchers. However, few studies were conducted on condensed fuzzy K-nearest neighbor. In this paper, we present a condensed fuzzy K-nearest neighbor (CFKNN) algorithm that starts from an initial instance set S and iteratively selects informative instances from training set T, moving them from T to S. Specifically, CFKNN consists of three steps. First, for each instance x ∈ T, it finds the K-nearest neighbors in S and calculates the fuzzy membership degrees of the K nearest neighbors using S rather than T. Second it computes the fuzzy membership degrees of x using the fuzzy K-nearest neighbor algorithm. Finally, it calculates the information entropy of x and selects an instance according to the calculated value. Extensive experiments on 11 datasets are conducted to compare CFKNN with four state-of-the-art algorithms (CNN, edited nearest neighbor (ENN), Tomeklinks, and OneSidedSelection) regarding the number of selected instances, the testing accuracy, and the compression ratio. The experimental results show that CFKNN provides excellent performance and outperforms the other four algorithms.

The fundamental aim of feature selection is to reduce the dimensionality of data by removing irrelevant and redundant features. As finding out the best subset of features from all possible subsets is computationally expensive, especially for high dimensional data sets, meta-heuristic algorithms are often used as a promising method for addressing the task. In this paper, a variant of recent meta-heuristic approach Owl Search Optimization algorithm (OSA) has been proposed for solving the feature selection problem within a wrapper-based framework. Several strategies are incorporated with an aim to strengthen BOSA (binary version of OSA) in searching the global best solution. The meta-parameter of BOSA is initialized dynamically and then adjusted using a self-adaptive mechanism during the search process. Besides, elitism and mutation operations are combined with BOSA to control the exploitation and exploration better. This improved BOSA is named in this paper as Modified Binary Owl Search Algorithm (MBOSA). Decision Tree (DT) classifier is used for wrapper based fitness function, and the final classification performance of the selected feature subset is evaluated by Support Vector Machine (SVM) classifier. Simulation experiments are conducted on twenty well-known benchmark datasets from UCI for the evaluation of the proposed algorithm, and the results are reported based on classification accuracy, the number of selected features, and execution time. In addition, BOSA along with three common meta-heuristic algorithms Binary Bat Algorithm (BBA), Binary Particle Swarm Optimization (BPSO), and Binary Genetic Algorithm (BGA) are used for comparison. Simulation results show that the proposed approach outperforms similar methods by reducing the number of features significantly while maintaining a comparable level of classification accuracy.

This paper focuses on script identification in natural scene images. Traditional CNNs (Convolution Neural Networks) cannot solve this problem perfectly for two reasons: one is the arbitrary aspect ratios of scene images which bring much difficulty to traditional CNNs with a fixed size image as the input. And the other is that some scripts with minor differences are easily confused because they share a subset of characters with the same shapes. We propose a novel approach combing Score CNN, Attention CNN and patches. Attention CNN is utilized to determine whether a patch is a discriminative patch and calculate the contribution weight of the discriminative patch to script identification of the whole image. Score CNN uses a discriminative patch as input and predict the score of each script type. Firstly patches with the same size are extracted from the scene images. Secondly these patches are used as inputs to Score CNN and Attention CNN to train two patch-level classifiers. Finally, the results of multiple discriminative patches extracted from the same image via the above two classifiers are fused to obtain the script type of this image. Using patches with the same size as inputs to CNN can avoid the problems caused by arbitrary aspect ratios of scene images. The trained classifiers can mine discriminative patches to accurately identify some confusing scripts. The experimental results show the good performance of our approach on four public datasets.

In this paper, we propose a new hybrid model called N-soft rough sets, which can be seen as a combination of rough sets and N-soft sets. Moreover, approximation operators and some useful properties with respect to N-soft rough approximation space are introduced. Furthermore, we propose decision making procedures for N-soft rough sets, the approximation sets are utilized to handle problems involving multi-criteria decision-making(MCDM), aiming at electing the optional objects and the possible optional objects based on their attribute set. The algorithm addresses some limitations of the extended rough sets models in dealing with inconsistent decision problems. Finally, an application of N-soft rough sets in multi-criteria decision making is illustrated with a real life example.

Wireless Sensor Node (WSN) helps to track inpatient and remote patient (home/working) health information. Mishandling of the electronic system, patient behaviour and environmental changes which are all lead to incorrect data generation while using WSN for medical purposes. It leads to a false alarm being raised, network resource wastage, a false node priority level and low reliability. We have introduced the Mutual Trust Model (MTM) for Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) with the help of Fog-Node (FN) to address these issues and to ensure the trustworthiness of the information acquired. In this, First-Hand Trust Method calculates the confidence value of the individual sensor node. Then, with neighbor node support, the Stigmercy Trust Method (STM) is implemented to reinforce the trust source node. Ultimately, the individual patient’s confidence value for the MTM model is determined. With the assistance of the wireless-mininet network emulator and the RYU controller, the network environment model implement, and the results have been obtained. MTM predicts the confidence level of the collected data significantly and produces an accuracy of 92.3 percentage to prevent the emergency band from being used dispensable.

Inputs and outputs of Decision Making Units (DMUs) are estimated by the Inverse Data Envelopment Analysis (InvDEA) models, while their relative efficiency scores remain unchanged. But, in some cases, cost/price information of the inputs and outputs are available. This paper employs the input and output cost/price information, including the generalized InvDEA concept in two-stage structures. To this end, it proposes a four-stage method to deal with the InvDEA concept, for estimating the inputs and outputs of the DMUs with a two-stage network structure method, while the allocative efficiency scores of all the units remain stable. Eventually, an empirical example is rendered to illustrate the competence of the method which is presented.

For the sake of better handle the imprecise and uncertain information in decision making problems(DMPs), linguistic interval-valued intuitionistic fuzzy numbers(LIVIFNs) based aggregation operators (AOS) are proposed by combining extended Copulas (ECs), extended Co-copulas (ECCs), power average operator and linguistic interval-valued intuitionistic fuzzy information (LIVIFI). First of all, ECs and ECCs, some specifics of ECs and ECCs, score and accuracy functions of LIVIFNs are gained. Then, based on ECs and ECCs, several aggregation operators are proposed to aggregate LIVIFI, which can offer decision makers (DMs) desirable generality and flexibility. In addition, the desired properties of proposed AOS are discussed. Last but not least, a MAGDM approach is constructed based on proposed AOs; Consequently, the effectiveness of the proposed approach is verified by a numerical example, and then the advantages are showed by comparing with other approaches.

Fuzzy set (FS) theory is one of the most important tool to deasl with complicated and difficult information in real-world. Now FS has many extensions and hesitant fuzzy set (HFS) is one of them. Further generalization of FS is complex fuzzy set (CFS), which contains only the membership grade, whose range is unit disc instead of [0, 1]. The aim of this paper is to present the idea of complex hesitant fuzzy set (CHFS) and to introduce its basic properties. Basically, CHFS is the combination of CFS and HFS to deal with two dimension information in a single set. Further, the vector similarity measures (VSMs) such as Jaccard similarity measures (JSMs), Dice similarity measures (DSMs) and Cosine similarity measures (CSMs) for CHFSs are discussed. The special cases of the proposed measures are also discussed. Then, the notion of complex hesitant fuzzy hybrid vector similarity measures are utilized in the environment of pattern recognition and medical diagnosis. Further, based on these distance measures, a decision-making method has been presented for finding the best alternative under the set of the feasible one. Illustrative examples from the field of pattern recognition as well as medical diagnosis have been taken to validate the approach. Finally, the comparison between proposed approaches with existing approaches are also discussed to find the reliability and proficiency of the elaborated measures for complex hesitant fuzzy elements.

Development of a robust triple multimodal biometric approach for human authentication using fingerprint, iris and voice biometric is the main objective of this manuscript. Accordingly, three essential algorithms for biometric authentication are presented. The extracted features from these multimodals are combined via feature fusion center (FFC) and feature scores. These features are trained through artificial neural network (ANN) and support vector machine (SVM) classifiers. The first algorithm depends on boundary energy method (BEM) extracted features from fingerprint, normalized combinational features from iris and dimensionality reduction methods (DRM) from voice using sum/average FFC. The second proposed algorithm uses extracted features from zoning method of fingerprint, SIFT of iris and higher order statistics (HOS) of voice signals. The third proposed algorithm consists of extracted features from zoning method for fingerprint, SIFT from iris and DRM from voice signals. Classification accuracy of implemented algorithms is estimated. Comparison between proposed algorithms is introduced in terms of equal error rate (EER) and ROC curves. The experimental results confirm superiority of second proposed algorithm which achieves a classification rate of 100% using SVM classifier and sum FFC. From computational point of view, the first algorithm consumes the lowest time using SVM classifier. On other hand, the lowest EER is achieved by first proposed algorithm for extracted features from Karhunen-Loeve transform (KLT) method of DRM. Additionally, the lowest ROC curves are accomplished respectively for extracted features from multidimensional scaling (MDS), generated ARMA synthesis and Isomap features. Their accuracy is improved with SVM. Also, the sum FFC introduces efficient results compared to average FFC. These algorithms have the advantages of robustness and the strength of selecting unimodal, double and triple biometric authentication. The obtained results accomplish a remarkable accuracy for authentication and security within multi practical applications.

In this paper, an integrated model combining interval deep belief network (IDBN) and neural network with nonlinear weights, called IDBN-NN, is proposed for interval-valued data modeling. Firstly, the IDBN with variable learning rate is designed to initialize parameters of each sub-model. Based on a modified contrastive divergence algorithm the least square method is adopted to identify the coefficients of nonlinear weights in the output layer. Then, to improve the modeling accuracy, the Fuzzy C-Means (FCM) method and the Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) algorithm are applied to tune the weights of sub-models. Though each sub-model can capture the nonlinear feature of the original system, by intersecting cut sets the synthesizing modeling scheme can further improve the performance of the proposed model. Some numerical examples show that the IDBN-NN with nonlinear output structure can achieve higher accuracy than some interval-valued data modeling methods.

 In Rough margin-based ν-Twin Support Vector Machine (Rν-TSVM) algorithm, the rough theory is introduced. Rν-TSVM gives different penalties to the corresponding misclassified samples according to their positions, so it avoids the overfitting problem to some extent. While the input data is a tensor, Rν-TSVM cannot handle it directly and may not utilize the data information effectively. Therefore, we propose a novel classifier based on tensor data, termed as Rough margin-based ν-Twin Support Tensor Machine (Rν-TSTM). Similar to Rν-TSVM, Rν-TSTM constructs rough lower margin, rough upper margin and rough boundary in tensor space. Rν-TSTM not only retains the superiority of Rν-TSVM, but also has its unique advantages. Firstly, the data topology is retained more efficiently by the direct use of tensor representation. Secondly, it has better classification performance compared to other classification algorithms. Thirdly, it can avoid overfitting problem to a great extent. Lastly, it is more suitable for high dimensional and small sample size problem. To solve the corresponding optimization problem in Rν-TSTM, we adopt the alternating iteration method in which the parameters corresponding to the hyperplanes are estimated by solving a series of Rν-TSVM optimization problem. The efficiency and superiority of the proposed method are demonstrated by computational experiments.

The purpose of this study is the statistical analysis and discrimination of maize seed using a machine vision (MV) approach. The foundation of the digital image dataset holds six maize seed varieties named as Kargal K-9803, Gujjar Khan, Desi White, Pioner 30Y87, Syngenta ST-6142, and Pioner 31R88. The digital image dataset acquired via a digital imaging laboratory. For preprocessing, we crop the image into a size of 600×600 pixels, and convert it into a gray level image format. After that, line and edge detection are performed by using a Prewitt filter, and five non-overlapping areas of interest (AOIs) size of (200×200), and (250×250) are drawn. A total of 56 statistical features, containing texture features, histogram features, and spectral features, is extracted from each AOI. The 11 optimized statistical features have been selected by deploying “Correlation-based Feature Selection” (CFS) with the Greedy algorithm. For the discrimination analysis, four MV classifiers named as “Support Vector Machine” (SVM), “Logistic” (Lg), “Bagging” (B), and “LogitBoost” (LB) have been deployed on optimized statistical features dataset. After analysis, the SVM classifier has shown a promising accuracy of 99.93% on AOIs size (250×250). The obtained accuracy by SVM classifier on six maize seed varieties, namely Kargal K-9803, Gujjar Khan, Desi White, Pioner 30Y87, Syngenta ST-6142, and Pioner 31R88, were 99.9%, 99.8%, 100%, 100%, 99.9%, and 99.8%, respectively.

The multi-granulation rough sets serve as important hierarchical models for intelligent systems. However, their mainstream optimistic and pessimistic models are respectively too loose and strict, and this defect becomes especially serious in hierarchical processing on an attribute-expansion sequence. Aiming at the attribute-addition chain, compromised multi-granulation rough set models are proposed to systematically complement and balance the optimistic and pessimistic models. According to the knowledge refinement and measure order induced by the attribute-enlargement sequence, the basic measurement positioning and corresponding pointer labeling based on equilibrium statistics are used, and thus we construct four types of compromised models at three levels of knowledge, approximation, and accuracy. At the knowledge level, the median positioning of ordered granulations derives Compromised-Model 1; at the approximation level, the average positioning of approximation cardinalities is performed, and thus the separation and integration of dual approximations respectively generate Compromised-Models 2 and 3; at the accuracy level, the average positioning of applied accuracies yields Compromised-Model 4. Compromised-Models 1–4 adopt distinctive cognitive levels and statistical perspectives to improve and perfect the multi-granulation rough sets, and their properties and effectiveness are finally verified by information systems and data experiments.

The construction of high-speed rails is regarded as a major opportunity for urban development by local governments in China, so various grand development plans are actively formulated to promote urban economic development. In this paper, the development of station space is evaluated empirically based on the calculated node and place values of 24 high-speed rail stations along the Beijing-Shanghai line and Bertolini’s “node-place” model. The results show that: (1) The 24 stations along the Beijing-Shanghai line have different development scale, which mostly act as sub-centers of the city, where the real estate industry, modern service industry and cultural industry are dominated in station space planning. Moreover, local governments are optimistic about the accelerant effect of high-speed rail stations whose functional configuration along the line is relatively repeated, because all 24 stations are basically set with business centers. (2) The size of cities along the Beijing-Shanghai line is related to the node value, the higher the urban function level, the greater the node value, with great differences among cities. The node value of big cities is far higher than that of small and medium-sized cities, hence there are node-oriented station areas in big cities and place-oriented ones in middle-sized and small cities. However, there is no direct relationship between the urban function level of stations along the line and the value of urban places. In some small and medium-sized cities, the planning and development intensity and scale of station areas even exceed that of big cities. (3) Only Wuxi station and Nanjing station are in a balanced development state in the space planning of railway stations along the Beijing-Shanghai line. Therefore, the risk of long-term development of station area should be considered in the planning, and reasonable measures should be formulated to promote the sustainable development of station area, so as to form the overall development of Station City.

Day-ahead electricity tariff prediction is advantageous for both consumers and utilities. This article discusses the home energy management (HEM) scheme consisting of an electricity tariff predictor and appliance scheduler. The random forest (RF) technique predicts a short-term electricity tariff for the next 24 hours using the past three months of electricity tariff information. This predictor provides the tariff information to schedule the appliances at the most preferred time slot of a consumer with minimum electricity tariff, aiming high consumer comfort and low electricity bill for consumers. The proposed approach allows a user to be aware of their demand and their comfort. The proposed approach makes use of present-day (D) tariff and immediate previous 30 days (D-1, D-2, ...  , D-30) of tariff information for training achieves minimum error values for next day electricity tariff prediction. The simulation results demonstrate the benefits of the RF approach for tariff prediction by comparing it with the support vector machine (SVM) and decision tree (DT) predicted tariffs against the actual tariff, provided by the utility day-ahead. The outcomes indicate that the RF produces the best results compared to SVM and DT predictions for performance metrics and end-user comfort.

The aim of this study is to introduce fuzzy filters of Sheffer stroke Hilbert algebra. After defining fuzzy filters of Sheffer stroke Hilbert algebra, it is shown that a quotient structure of this algebra is described by its fuzzy filter. In addition to this, the level filter of a Sheffer stroke Hilbert algebra is determined by its fuzzy filter. Some fuzzy filters of a Sheffer stroke Hilbert algebra are defined by a homomorphism. Normal and maximal fuzzy filters of a Sheffer stroke Hilbert algebra and the relation between them are presented. By giving the Cartesian product of fuzzy filters of a Sheffer stroke Hilbert algebra, various properties are examined.

Tens of thousands of work-related injuries and deaths are reported in the construction industry each year, and a high percentage of them are due to construction workers not wearing safety equipment. In order to address this safety issue, it is particularly necessary to automatically identify people and detect the safety characteristics of personnel at the same time in the prefabricated building. Therefore, this paper proposes a depth feature detection algorithm based on the Extended-YOLOv3 model. On the basis of the YOLOv3 network, a security feature recognition network and a feature transmission network are added to achieve the purpose of detecting security features while identifying personnel. Firstly, a security feature recognition network is added side by side on the basis of the YOLOv3 network to analyze the wearing characteristics of construction workers. Secondly, the S-SPP module is added to the object detection and feature recognition network to broaden the features of the deep network and help the network extract more useful features from the high-resolution input image. Finally, a special feature transmission network is designed to transfer features between the construction worker detection network and the security feature recognition network, so that the two networks can obtain feature information from the other network respectively. Compared with YOLOv3 algorithm, Extended-YOLOv3 in this paper adds security feature recognition and feature transmission functions, and adds S-SPP module to the object detection and feature recognition network. The experimental results show that the Extended-YOLOv3 algorithm is 1.3% better than the YOLOV3 algorithm in AP index.

Mobile Cloud Computing (MCC) addresses the drawbacks of Mobile Users (MU) where the in-depth evaluation of mobile applications is transferred to a centralized cloud via a wireless medium to reduce load, therefore optimizing resources. In this paper, we consider the resource (i.e., bandwidth and memory) allocation problem to support mobile applications in a MCC environment. In such an environment, Mobile Cloud Service Providers (MCSPs) form a coalition to create a resource pool to share their resources with the Mobile Cloud Users. To enhance the welfare of the MCSPs, a method for optimal resource allocation to the mobile users called, Poisson Linear Deep Resource Allocation (PL-DRA) is designed. For resource allocation between mobile users, we formulate and solve optimization models to acquire an optimal number of application instances while meeting the requirements of mobile users. For optimal application instances, the Poisson Distributed Queuing model is designed. The distributed resource management is designed as a multithreaded model where parallel computation is provided. Next, a Linear Gradient Deep Resource Allocation (LG-DRA) model is designed based on the constraints, bandwidth, and memory to allocate mobile user instances. This model combines the advantage of both decision making (i.e. Linear Programming) and perception ability (i.e. Deep Resource Allocation). Besides, a Stochastic Gradient Learning is utilized to address mobile user scalability. The simulation results show that the Poisson queuing strategy based on the improved Deep Learning algorithm has better performance in response time, response overhead, and energy consumption than other algorithms.

As the scale of software systems continues expanding, software architecture is receiving more and more attention as the blueprint for the complex software system. An outstanding architecture requires a lot of professional experience and expertise. In current practice, architects try to find solutions manually, which is time-consuming and error-prone because of the knowledge barrier between newcomers and experienced architects. The problem can be solved by easing the process of apply experience from prominent architects. To this end, this paper proposes a novel graph-embedding-based method, AI-CTO, to automatically suggest software stack solutions according to the knowledge and experience of prominent architects. Firstly, AI-CTO converts existing industry experience to knowledge, i.e., knowledge graph. Secondly, the knowledge graph is embedded in a low-dimensional vector space. Then, the entity vectors are used to predict valuable software stack solutions by an SVM model. We evaluate AI-CTO with two case studies and compare its solutions with the software stacks of large companies. The experiment results show that AI-CTO can find effective and correct stack solutions and it outperforms other baseline methods.

Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) is the most popular mathematical approach to assess efficiency of decision-making units (DMUs). In complex organizations, DMUs face a heterogeneous condition regarding environmental factors which affect their efficiencies. When there are a large number of objects, non-homogeneity of DMUs significantly influences their efficiency scores that leads to unfair ranking of DMUs. The aim of this study is to deal with non-homogeneous DMUs by implementing a clustering technique for further efficiency analysis. This paper proposes a common set of weights (CSW) model with ideal point method to develop an identical weight vector for all DMUs. This study proposes a framework to measuring efficiency of complex organizations, such as banks, that have several operational styles or various objectives. The proposed framework helps managers and decision makers (1) to identify environmental components influencing the efficiency of DMUs, (2) to use a fuzzy equivalence relation approach proposed here to cluster the DMUs to homogenized groups, (3) to produce a common set of weights (CSWs) for all DMUs with the model developed here that considers fuzzy data within each cluster, and finally (4) to calculate the efficiency score and overall ranking of DMUs within each cluster.

This paper investigates governments’ performance in the country. We achieved this objective differently. We employed an inverse method of assessment, with the utilization of factor copula modeling technique, to study the dependence relationship of exchange rates returns as auxiliary variables, the performance of political and army government tenures in the country in the last two decades are evaluated. Through factor analysis, common factors for the exchange rate are obtained. The analysis shows that conditioned on the common factors, the dependence amongst the elected currencies are strongly asymmetric in most of the tenures except the term of Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz, and condition on common factor Clayton copula demonstrating hypothesis is more suitable. However, we perceive high left tail reliance among foreign currency returns during Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz tenure, and the condition on common factor Gumbel copula molding assumption is more appropriate. We are signifying the foulest government performance in the country among all occupancies under consideration.

Speech enhancement is a very important problem in various speech processing applications. Recently, supervised speech enhancement using deep learning approaches to estimate a time-frequency mask have proved remarkable performance gain. In this paper, we have proposed time-frequency masking-based supervised speech enhancement method for improving intelligibility and quality of the noisy speech. We believe that a large performance gain can be achieved if deep neural networks (DNNs) are layer-wise pre-trained by stacking Gaussian-Bernoulli Restricted Boltzmann Machine (GB-RBM). The proposed DNN is called as Gaussian-Bernoulli Deep Belief Network (GB-DBN) and are optimized by minimizing errors between the estimated and pre-defined masks. Non-linear Mel-Scale weighted mean square error (L_MW-MSE) loss function is used as training criterion. We have examined the performance of the proposed pre-training scheme using different DNNs which are established on three time-frequency masks comprised of the ideal amplitude mask (IAM), ideal ratio mask (IRM), and phase sensitive mask (PSM). The results in different noisy conditions demonstrated that when DNNs are pre-trained by the proposed scheme provided a persistent performance gain in terms of the perceived speech intelligibility and quality. Also, the proposed pre-training scheme is effective and robust in noisy training data.

Up to now, there have been a lot of research results about multi-attribute decision making problems by fuzzy graph theory. However, there are few investigations about multi-attribute decision making problems under the background of indecisiveness. The main reason is that the difference of cognition and the complexity of thinking by decision makers, for the same question have different opinions. In this paper, we proposed a hesitant fuzzy hypergraph model based on hesitant fuzzy sets and fuzzy hypergraphs. At the same time, some basic graph operations of hesitant fuzzy hypergraphs are investigated and several equivalence relationship between hesitant fuzzy hypergraphs, hesitant fuzzy formal concept analysis and hesitant fuzzy information systems are discussed. Since granular computing can deal with multi-attribute decision-making problems well, we considered the hesitant fuzzy hypergraph model of granular computing, and established an algorithm of multi-attribute decision-making problem based on hesitant fuzzy hypergraph model. Finally an example is given to illustrate the effectiveness of the algorithm.

Coreference resolution is critical for improving the performance of all text-based systems including information extraction, document summarization, machine translation, and question-answering. Most of coreference resolution solutions rely on using knowledge resources like lexical knowledge, syntactic knowledge, world knowledge and semantic knowledge. This paper presents a new knowledge-based coreference resolution model using neural network architecture. It uses XLNet embeddings as input and does not rely on any syntactic or dependency parsers. For more efficient span representation and mention detection, we used entity-level information. Mentions were extracted from the text with an unhand engineered mention detector, and the features were extracted from a deep neural network. We also propose a nonlinear multi-criteria ranking model to rank the candidate antecedents. This model simultaneously determines the total score of alternatives and the weight of the features in order to speed up the process of ranking alternatives. Compared to the state-of-the-art models, the simulation results showed significant improvements on the English CoNLL-2012 shared task (+6.4 F1). Moreover, we achieved 96.1% F1 score on the n2c2 medical dataset.

Massive digital documents on Internet leading to use e-learning, and it becomes an emerging field of research due to the massive growth of internet users. E-learning requires suitable document ranking method to avoid navigating to the next Search Engine Result Page (SERP) frequently. The existing document ranking methods are lacking to rank the documents independently based on the conceptual contents. This paper proposes a novel method for ranking the documents independently based on the different classification of term it contains. In this approach, the terms are classified into five categories such as (1) direct query term, (2) expanded terms, (3) semantically related term, (4) supporting terms and (5) stop words. The query has been expanded using domain ontology to acquire more semantic terms for better understanding of user query. The semantic weight has been applied independently over different categories of terms in a document for ranking. The document with the highest augmented value in each category of terms has been ranked first. Remaining documents are ranked in the same way and are arranged in the descending order. The WordNet tool is utilized as a knowledge base and Wu and Palmer semantic distance method have applied for measuring semantic distance between the query and document terms for ranking the terms. The experiments show that the performance of the proposed document ranking method for e-learning retrieved better document compared with existing document ranking methods.

Recommender systems have recently become a significant part of e-commerce applications. Through the different types of recommender systems, collaborative filtering is the most popular and successful recommender system for providing recommendations. Recent studies have shown that using multi-criteria ratings helps the system to know the customers better. However, bringing multi aspects to collaborative filtering causes new challenges such as scalability and sparsity. Additionally, revealing the relation between criteria is yet another optimization problem. Hence, increasing the accuracy in prediction is a challenge. In this paper, an aggregation-function based multi-criteria collaborative filtering system using Rough Sets Theory is proposed as a novel approach. Rough Sets Theory is used to uncover the relationship between the overall criterion and the individual criteria. Experimental results show that the proposed model (RoughMCCF) successfully improves the predictive accuracy without compromising on online performance.

Success of metaheuristic algorithms depends on the efficient balance between of exploration and exploitation phases. Any optimization algorithm requires a combination of diverse exploration and proper exploitation to avoid local optima. This paper proposes a new improved version of the Woodpecker Mating Algorithm (WMA), based on opposition-based learning, known as the OWMA aiming to develop exploration and exploitation capacities and establish a simultaneous balance between these two phases. This improvement consists of three major mechanisms, the first of which is the new Distance Opposition-based Learning (DOBL) mechanism for improving exploration, diversity, and convergence. The second mechanism is the allocation of local memory of personal experiences of search agents for developing the exploitation capacity. The third mechanism is the use of a self-regulatory and dynamic method for setting the Hα parameter to improve the Running Away function (RA) performance. The ability of the proposed algorithm to solve 23 benchmark mathematical functions was evaluated and compared to that of a series of the latest and most popular metaheuristic methods reviewed in the research literature. The proposed algorithm is also used as a Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP) neural network trainer to solve the classification problem on four biomedical datasets and three function approximation datasets. In addition, the OWMA algorithm was evaluated in five optimization problems constrained by the real world. The simulation results proved the superior and promising performance of the proposed algorithm in the majority of evaluations. The results prove the superiority and promising performance of the proposed algorithm in solving very complicated optimization problems.

Data preprocessing is a necessary core in data mining. Preprocessing involves handling missing values, outlier and noise removal, data normalization, etc. The problem with existing methods which handle missing values is that they deal with the whole data ignoring the characteristics of the data (e.g., similarities and differences between cases). This paper focuses on handling the missing values using machine learning methods taking into account the characteristics of the data. The proposed preprocessing method clusters the data, then imputes the missing values in each cluster depending on the data belong to this cluster rather than the whole data. The author performed a comparative study of the proposed method and ten popular imputation methods namely mean, median, mode, KNN, IterativeImputer, IterativeSVD, Softimpute, Mice, Forimp, and Missforest. The experiments were done on four datasets with different number of clusters, sizes, and shapes. The empirical study showed better effectiveness from the point of view of imputation time, Root Mean Square Error (RMSE), Mean Absolute Error (MAE), and coefficient of determination (R² score) (i.e., the similarity of the original removed value to the imputed one).

Topological concepts play an important role in applications and solving real-life problems. Among of these concepts are neighbourhood and minimal structure. In this paper, we introduce a new space-based on a generalized system with a binary relation on a nonempty set by using the concept of a minimal structure, which is called a minimal structure approximation space (briefly, MSAS), and study some of its properties. Also, we compare the advantages of MSAS with neighbourhood approximation space which are based on the same starting point, and apply the concept of MSAS in some examples of chemistry to extraction and reduct the information. Finally, we investigate the concepts of the separation axioms on MSAS and study some of its properties in the information system as the process of approximation of information.

In the rough set theory proposed by Pawlak, the concept of reduct is very important. The reduct is the minimum attribute set that preserves the partition of the universe. A great deal of research in the past has attempted to reduce the representation of the original table. The advantage of using a reduced representation table is that it can summarize the original table so that it retains the original knowledge without distortion. However, using reduct to summarize tables may encounter the problem of the table still being too large, so users will be overwhelmed by too much information. To solve this problem, this article considers how to further reduce the size of the table without causing too much distortion to the original knowledge. Therefore, we set an upper limit for information distortion, which represents the maximum degree of information distortion we allow. Under this upper limit of distortion, we seek to find the summary table with the highest compression. This paper proposes two algorithms. The first is to find all summary tables that satisfy the maximum distortion constraint, while the second is to further select the summary table with the greatest degree of compression from these tables.

Fuzzy C-means clustering algorithm (FCM) is an effective approach for clustering. However, in most existing FCM type frameworks, only in-cluster compactness is taken into account, whereas the between-cluster separability is overlooked. In this paper, to enhance the clustering, by incorporating the feature weighting and data weighting method, we put forward a new weighted fuzzy C-means clustering approach considering between-cluster separability, in which for achieving good compactness and separability, making the in-cluster distances as small as possible and making the between-cluster distances as large as possible, the in-cluster distances and between-cluster distances are taken into account; To achieve the optimal clustering result, the iterative formulas of the feature weights, membership degrees, data weights and cluster centers are obtained by maximizing the in-cluster compactness and the between-cluster separability. Experiments on real-world datasets were carried out, the results showed that the new approach could obtain promising performance.

Capsule Networks (CapsNets) excel on simple image recognition problems. However, they fail to perform on complex images with high similarity and background objects. This paper proposes Local Binary Pattern (LBP) k-means routing and evaluates its performance on three publicly available plant disease datasets containing images with high similarity and background objects. The proposed routing algorithm adopts the squared Euclidean distance, sigmoid function, and a ‘simple-squash’ in place of dot product, SoftMax normalizer, and the squashing function found respectively in the dynamic routing algorithm. Extensive experiments conducted on the three datasets showed that the proposed model achieves consistent improvement in test accuracy across the three datasets as well as allowing an increase in the number of routing iterations with no performance degradation. The proposed model outperformed a baseline CapsNet by 8.37% on the tomato dataset with an overall test accuracy of 98.80%, comparable to state-of-the-art models on the same datasets.

In this paper, we research a class of axioms in closed G-V fuzzy matroids. The main research method is to transform fuzzy matroids into matroids. First, we study many properties of the basis family of induced matroids, and define a new mapping which can reflect the relationship between bases of induced matroids of a G-V fuzzy matroid. Second, we discuss the new mapping, and reveal the relationship and properties among the fundamental sequence, the induced basis family and the new mapping of a G-V fuzzy matroid. From these relationships and properties, we extract four key attributes: normativity property, inclusion property, exchange property, and right surjection. Finally, we propose and prove “the induced basis axioms for a closed G-V fuzzy matroid” by these key attributes. With the help of these axioms, a closed G-V fuzzy matroid can be uniquely determined by a finite number sequence, a subset family and a mapping on this subset family when they satisfy above four attributes, and vice versa.

In the recent phenomenon of social networks, both online and offline, two nodes may be connected, but they may not follow each other. Thus there are two separate links to be given to capture the notion. Directed links are given if the nodes follow each other, and undirected links represent the regular connections (without following). Thus, this network may have both types of relationships/ links simultaneously. This type of network can be represented by mixed graphs. But, uncertainties in following and connectedness exist in complex systems. To capture the uncertainties, fuzzy mixed graphs are introduced in this article. Some operations, completeness, and regularity and few other properties of fuzzy mixed graphs are explained. Representation of fuzzy mixed graphs as matrix and isomorphism theorems on fuzzy mixed graphs are developed. A network of COVID19 affected areas in India are assumed, and central regions are identified as per the proposed theory.

With the growing importance of the fuzzy spatiotemporal data in information application, there is an increasing need for researching on the integration method of multi-source heterogeneous fuzzy spatiotemporal data. In this paper, we first propose a fuzzy spatiotemporal RDF graph model based on RDF (Resource Description Framework) that proposed by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) to represent data in triples (subject, predicate, object). Secondly, we analyze and classify the related heterogeneous problems of multi-source heterogeneous fuzzy spatiotemporal data, and use the fuzzy spatiotemporal RDF graph model to define the corresponding rules to solve these heterogeneous problems. In addition, based on the characteristics of RDF triples, we analyze the heterogeneous problem of multi-source heterogeneous fuzzy spatiotemporal data integration in RDF triples, and provide the integration methods FRDFG in this paper. Finally, we report our experiments results to validate our approach and show its significant superiority.

The generation of electric energy by photovoltaic (PV) panels depends on many parameters, one of them is the sun’s angle of incidence. By using solar active trackers, it is possible to maximize generation capacity through real-time positioning. However, if the engines that update the position of the panels use more energy than the difference in efficiency, the solar tracker system becomes ineffective. In this way, a time series forecasting method can be assumed to determine the generation capacity in a pre-established horizon prediction to evaluate if a position update would provide efficient results. Among a wide range of algorithms that can be used in forecasting, this work considered a Neuro-Fuzzy Inference System due to its combined advantages such as smoothness property from Fuzzy systems and adaptability property from neural networks structures. Focusing on time series forecasting, this article presents a model and evaluates the solar prediction capacity using the Wavelet Neuro-Fuzzy algorithm, where Wavelets were included in the model for feature extraction. In this sense, this paper aims to evaluate whether it is possible to obtain reasonable accuracy using a hybrid model for electric power generation forecasting considering solar trackers. The main contributions of this work are related to the efficiency improvement of PV panels. By assuming a hybrid computational model, it is possible to make a forecast and determine if the use of solar tracking is interesting during certain periods. Finally, the proposed model showed promising results when compared to traditional Nonlinear autoregressive model structures.

In this paper, neutrosophic N -structures are applied to p-ideals of BCI-algebras. In fact, we introduce the notion of neutrosophic N -p-ideal in BCI-algebras, and investigate several properties. Further, we present characterizations of neutrosophic N -p-ideal. Moreover, we consider relations between a neutrosophic N -ideal and a neutrosophic N -p-ideal. Also, we provide conditions for a neutrosophic N -ideal to be a neutrosophic N -p-ideal. Furthermore, it is proved that the neutrosophic N -structure Q N G over Q is a neutrosophic N p -ideal of Q ⇔ G is a p-ideal of Q where G is a non-empty subset of a BCI-algebras Q.

This article puts forward an innovative notion of complex picture fuzzy set (CPFS) which is particularly an extension and a generalization of picture fuzzy sets (PFSs) by the addition of phase term in the description of PFSs. The uniqueness of CPFS lies in the capability to manage the uncertainty and periodicity, simultaneously, due to the presence of phase term which broadens the range of CPFS from a real plane to the complex plane of unit disk. We describe and verify the fundamental operations and properties of CPFSs. We introduce the aggregation operators, namely; complex picture fuzzy power averaging and complex picture fuzzy power geometric operators in CPFSs environment, based on weighted and ordered weighted averaging and geometric operators. We construct multi-criteria decision making (MCDM) problem, using these operators and describe a numerical example to illustrate the validity and competence of this article. Finally, we discuss the advantages of this generalized concept of aggregation technique and analyze a comparative study to demonstrate the superiority and consistency of our model.

Fault-tolerant resolving partition is natural extension of resolving partitions which have many applications in different areas of computer sciences for example sensor networking, intelligent systems, optimization and robot navigation. For a nontrivial connected graph G (V (G) , E (G)), the partition representation of vertex v with respect to an ordered partition Π = {S _i  : 1 ≤ i ≤ k} of V (G) is the k-vector r ( v | Π ) = ( d ( v , S i ) ) i = 1 k , where, d (v, S _i ) = min {d (v, x) |x ∈ S _i }, for i ∈ {1, 2, …, k}. A partition Π is said to be fault-tolerant partition resolving set of G if r (u|Π) and r (v|Π) differ by at least two places for all u ≠ v ∈ V (G). A fault-tolerant partition resolving set of minimum cardinality is called the fault-tolerant partition basis of G and its cardinality the fault-tolerant partition dimension of G denoted by P ( G ) . In this article, we will compute fault-tolerant partition dimension of families of tadpole and necklace graphs.

The security of a train becomes a more critical issue as the train’s speed and the complexity of the railway conditions increases. It is especially true when the train runs on a curved radius rail when the lateral force between the train and the rail is less stable. The rail’s side grinding is a significant problem that affects the train’s safety, especially when the train passes through small radial sections in mountainous areas. The intelligent rail lubrication system is critical to enhancing rails’ safety and efficiency and reducing grease pollution along rail lines. This system is modeled with a force analysis of train curve motion and numerical simulation of wear power. The lubrication system is constructed with hardware and software. Based on fuzzy group analysis, this system and the adaptive Proportional Integration Differential (PID) controller is presented to improve the lubricative effects. The system test results show that the quality of lubrication control using this system is efficacious; the control convergence is more reliable than the conventional PID controller.

Linguistic intuitionistic fuzzy sets can qualitatively rather than quantitatively express data in the form of membership degree. But quantitative tools are required to handle qualitative information. Therefore, an improved linguistic scale function, which can more accurately manifest the subjective feelings of decision-makers, is employed to deal with linguistic intuitionistic information. Subsequently, due to some commonly used distance measures do not comprehensively evaluate the information of linguistic intuitionistic fuzzy sets, an improved distance measure of linguistic intuitionistic fuzzy sets is designed. It considers the cross-evaluation information to get more realistic reasoning results. In addition, a new similarity measure defined by nonlinear Gaussian diffusion model is proposed, which can provide different response scales for different information between various schemes. The properties of these measures are also studied in detail. On this basis, a method in linguistic intuitionistic fuzzy environment is developed to handle multi-attribute decision-making problems. Finally, an illustrative example is given to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method and the influence of the parameters is analyzed.

As an important psychological feature that affects the strategic decision-making of top management team (TMT), risk preference exerts important impact on the failure of innovation. Taking Chinese pharmaceutical listed companies from 2011 to 2017 as research samples, this paper uses principal component analysis and probit regression model to empirically test the impact of TMT risk preference on technological innovation failure of firms from the perspective of government intervention. It is found that TMT’s risk preference has a significantly positive impact on the failure of firms’ technological innovation. The regulatory role of government intervention between TMT’s risk preference and failure of firms’ technological innovation is an inverted U-shaped relationship. Low or high level of government intervention will promote the positive impact of TMT’s risk preference on the failure of technological innovation, and increase the risk of technological innovation failure. The findings of this study contribute to: (1) broaden the research perspective of technological innovation failure. (2) The innovation failure rate can be reduced by constructing or optimizing the TMT and the government intervening in firm innovation through reasonable and perfect technology innovation guidance policies. (3) expand the research means of innovation failure, making the results more convincing.

This paper seeks to improve the efficiency of photovoltaic (PV) water pumping system using Fractional-order Fuzzy Maximum Power Point Tracking (FoF-MPPT) control and Gray Wolf Optimization (GWO) technique. The fractional calculus has been used to provide an enhanced model of PV water pumping system to, accurately, describe its nonlinear characteristics. Moreover, three metaheuristic optimizers are applied to tune the parameters of the proposed FoF-MPPT, Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO), Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) and the GWO. The FoF-MPPT is intensively tested and compared to the Perturb and Observe (PO), the Incremental Conductance (INC) and the FL-MPPT controllers. A MATLAB-Simscape based physical model of the PV water pumping system has been developed and simulated for different control techniques with the proposed optimization algorithms. The response of the PV water pumping systems is evaluated under rapidly changing weather conditions to prove the effectiveness of the optimized FoF-MPPT compared to the conventional algorithms. The reliability of the comparative study has been emphasized in terms of several transient tracking and steady- state performance indices under different operating conditions. The simulation results show the effective performance of the proposed metaheuristic optimized FL-MPPT and FoF-MPPT control under different climatic conditions with disturbance rejection and robustness analysis.

The development of information measures associated with fuzzy and intuitionistic fuzzy sets is an important research area from the past few decades. Divergence and entropy are two significant information measures in the intuitionistic fuzzy set (IFS) theory, which have gained wider attention from researchers due to their extensive applications in different areas. In the literature, the existing information measures for IFSs have some drawbacks, which make them irrelevant to use in application areas. In order to obtain more robust and flexible information measures for IFSs, the present work develops and studies some parametric information measures under the intuitionistic fuzzy environment. First, the paper reviews the existing intuitionistic fuzzy divergence measures in detail with their shortcomings and then proposes four new order-α divergence measures between two IFSs. It is worth mentioning that the developed divergence measures satisfy several elegant mathematical properties. Second, we define four new entropy measures called order-α intuitionistic fuzzy entropy measures in order to quantify the fuzziness associated with an IFS. We prove basic and advanced properties of the order-α intuitionistic fuzzy entropy measures for justifying their validity. The paper shows that the introduced measures include various existing fuzzy and intuitionistic fuzzy information measures as their special cases. Further, utilizing the conventional multi-attributive border approximation area comparison (MABAC) model, we develop an intuitionistic fuzzy MABAC method to solve real-life multiple attribute group decision-making problems. Finally, the proposed method is demonstrated by using a practical application of personnel selection.

Images of green infrastructure (gardens, green corridor, green roofs and grasslands) large area can be captured and processed to provide spatial and temporal variation in colours of plant leaves. This may indicate average variation in plant growth over large urban landscape (community gardens, green corridor etc). Towards this direction, this short technical note explores development of a simple automated machine learning program that can accurately segregate colors from plant leaves. In this newly developed program, a machine learning algorithm has been modified and adapted to give the proportion of different colors present in a leaf. Python script is developed for an image processing. For validation, experiments are conducted in green house to grow Axonopus compressus. Script first extracts different RGB (Red Green and Blue) colors present in the leaf using the K-means clustering algorithm. Appropriate centroids required for the clusters of leaf colors are formed by the K-means algorithm. The new program provides saves computation time and gives output in form of different colors proportion as a CSV (Comma-Separated Values) file. This study is the first step towards the demonstration of using automated programs for the segregation of colors from the leaf in order to access the growth of the plant in an urban landscape.

Probabilistic linguistic term sets are used to express uncertain decision information in multiple attribute group decision making problems. For probabilistic linguistic multiple attribute group decision making (MAGDM) with weight determined by CRITIC (Criteria Importance Through Intercriteria Correlation) method, the probabilistic linguistic grey relational projection method is proposed in this paper. Firstly, the correlation coefficient among attributes and standard deviation of each attribute are utilized to compute the attributes weights. Then the most ideal alternative is decided by means of counting the grey relational projection (GRP) from probabilistic linguistic positive ideal solution and probabilistic linguistic negative ideal solution. In the end, a numerical example for site selection of hospital constructions is applied to further account for the extended method. The result demonstrates the availability of the proposed method and it can be used in other fields which refers to problems of selection.

In this paper, we generalize the concept of extended order algebras in order to get a new algebraic structure called “extended implicative groupoid”. First, we define the notions of pre-weak extended, weak extended, right extended and left extended implicative groupoid. Then we introduce the concept of extended implicative groupoid by using these notions. In addition, the special properties of these structures, such as the existence of MacNeille completion and adjoint product are studied. Finally, we prove that the class of symmetrical associative complete distributive extended implicative groupoids, coincides with complete residuated lattices.

Motivated by the concept of lattice-bornological vector spaces of J. Paseka, S. Solovyov and M. Stehlík, which extends bornological vector spaces to the fuzzy setting over a complete lattice, this paper continues to study the theory of L-bornological vector spaces. The specific description of L-bornological vector spaces is presented, some properties of Lowen functors between the category of bornological vector spaces and the category of L-bornological vector spaces are discussed. In addition, the notions and some properties of L-Mackey convergence and separation in L-bornological vector spaces are showed. The equivalent characterization of separation in L-bornological vector spaces in terms of L-Mackey convergence is obtained in particular.

 q-Rung orthopair fuzzy sets (q-ROFSs), originally proposed by Yager, can powerfully modify the range of indication of decision information by changing a parameter q based on the different hesitation degree, and the dual hesitant q-rung orthopair fuzzy set (DHq-ROFS), a new technique to consider human’s hesitance, can be more substantial of dealing with real multi-attribute decision making (MADM) problems. Inspired by DHq-ROFSs, in this article, we extend the concept of q-rung orthopair fuzzy graphs to dual hesitant q-rung orthopair fuzzy context and introduce the innovative concept of a dual hesitant q-rung orthopair fuzzy graphs based on Hamacher operator called dual hesitant q-rung orthopair fuzzy Hamacher graphs (DHq-ROFHGs). We propose the new concepts of geometric-arithmetic energy and atom bond connectivity energy of a DHq-ROFHG and determine its upper and lower bounds. Moreover, on the basis of the proposed concept of DHq-ROFHGs, we introduce a new approach to solve the MADM problems with dual hesitant q-rung orthopair fuzzy information. At the end, we give a numerical model related to the selection of most significant defensive factor to illustrate the applicability of the developed approach, and exhibit its viability. Comparative analysis is conducted and the superiorities are illustrated.

Differential equations occur in many fields of science, engineering and social science as it is a natural way of modeling uncertain dynamical systems. A bipolar fuzzy set model is useful mathematical tool for addressing uncertainty which is an extension of fuzzy set model. In this paper, we study differential equations in bipolar fuzzy environment. We introduce the concept gH-derivative of bipolar fuzzy valued function. We present some properties of gH-differentiability of bipolar fuzzy valued function by considering different types of differentiability. We consider bipolar fuzzy Taylor expansion. By using Taylor expansion, Euler method is presented for solving bipolar fuzzy initial value problems. We discuss convergence analysis of proposed method. We describe some numerical examples to see the convergence and stability of the method and compute global truncation error. From numerical results, we see that for small step size Euler method converges to exact solution.

 In this paper, a multistage decision-making problem concerning uncertainty and ambiguity is discussed using Pythagorean fuzzy sets. Complement Pythagorean fuzzy membership grades and their properties are also considered. Using the definition of an alpha-level set, we introduce the multistage decision-making problems, where the possibility theory and satisfaction grades are declared with the help of Pythagorean membership grades. Pythagorean multistage decision-making is an uncertain theory, where decision-maker has only one opportunity to choose the scenario under the combination of Pythagorean possibility and satisfaction grades at each stage. According to the selection of criteria, a series of decision points are concluded. The payoff collaborates with these decision points at each stage. The multistage decision-making using Pythagorean fuzzy sets is the scenario-based theory in place of other theories like lottery-based theory etc. The results have been calculated using multistage Pythagorean fuzzy sets in which the decision-maker has only one chance to select the optimal solution. The TOPSIS technique has been applied and the comparison between these two techniques is highlighted.

This article has been retracted, and the online PDF has been watermarked “RETRACTED”. The retraction notice is available at http://doi.org/10.3233/IFS-219216.

A q-rung orthopair fuzzy set (q-ROFS) is more practical and powerful than intuitionistic fuzzy set (IFS) and Pythagorean fuzzy set (PFS) to model uncertainty in various decision-making problems. In this research article, we introduce the notion of q-rung orthopair fuzzy Hamacher graphs (q-ROFHGs). We utilize the Hamacher operators because they are flexible and parameterized in decision making. We determine the energy of q-ROFHGs as well as the energy of splitting and shadow q-ROFHGs. In addition, we propose the Randić energy of q-ROFHG and its some substantial results. Further, we present the idea of q-rung orthopair fuzzy Hamacher digraphs (q-ROFHDGs). We solve a decision-making numerical example related to the selection of best housing society for investment by calculating the energy and Randić energy of q-ROFHDGs and an algorithm to exhibit the applicability of the presented concepts in decision making. Finally, we present the conclusion.

The objective of uncertain time series analysis is to explore the relationship between the imprecise observation data over time and to predict future values, where these data are uncertain variables in the sense of uncertainty theory. In this paper, the method of maximum likelihood is used to estimate the unknown parameters in the uncertain autoregressive model, and the unknown parameters of uncertainty distributions of the disturbance terms are simultaneously obtained. Based on the fitted autoregressive model, the forecast value and confidence interval of the future data are derived. Besides, the mean squared error is proposed to measure the goodness of fit among different estimation methods, and an algorithm is introduced. Finally, the comparative analysis of the least squares, least absolute deviations, and maximum likelihood estimations are given, and two examples are presented to verify the feasibility of this approach.

With the rapid increase of COVID-19, mostly people are facing antivirus mask shortages. It is necessary to select a good antivirus mask and make it useful for everyone. For maximize the efficacy of the antivirus masks, we propose a decision support algorithm based on the concept of Fermatean fuzzy soft set (FFS _f S). The basic purpose of this article is to introduce the notion of FFS _f S to deal with problems involving uncertainty and complexity corresponding to various parameters. Here, the valuable properties of FFS _f S are merged with the Yager operator to propose four new operators, namely, Fermatean fuzzy soft Yager weighted average (FFS _f YWA), Fermatean fuzzy soft Yager ordered weighted average (FFS _f YOWA), Fermatean fuzzy soft Yager weighted geometric (FFS _f YWG) and Fermatean fuzzy soft Yager ordered weighted geometric (FFS _f YOWG) operators. The fundamental properties of proposed operators are discussed. For the importance of proposed operators, a multi-attribute group decision-making (MAGDM) strategy is presented along with an application for the selection of an antivirus mask over the COVID-19 pandemic. The comparison with existing operators shows that existing operators cannot deal with data involving parametric study but developed operators have the ability to deal decision-making problems using parameterized information.

The emerging technologies with IoT (Internet of Things) systems are elevated as a prototype and combination of the smart connectivity ecosystem. These ecosystems are appropriately connected in a smart healthcare system which are generating finest monitoring activities among the patients, well-organized diagnosis process, intensive support and care against the traditional healthcare operations. But facilitating these highly technological adaptations, the preserving personal information of the patients are on the risk with data leakage and privacy theft in the current revolution. Concerning secure protection and privacy theft of the patient’s information. We emphasized this paper on secure monitoring with the help of intelligently recorded summary’s keyframe extraction and applied two rounds lightweight cosine-transform encryption. This article includes firstly, a regimented process of keyframe extraction which is employed to retrieve meaningful frames of image through visual sensor with sending alert (quick notice) to authority. Secondly, employed two rounds of lightweight cosine-transform encryption operation of agreed (detected) keyframes to endure security and safety for the further any kinds of attacks from the adversary. The combined methodology corroborates highly usefulness with engendering appropriate results, little execution of encryption time (0.2277-0.2607), information entropy (7.9996), correlation coefficient (0.0010), robustness (NPCR 99.6383, UACI 33.3516), uniform histogram deviation (R 0.0359, G 0.0492, B 0.0582) and other well adopted secure ideology than any other keyframe or image encryption approaches. Furthermore, this incorporating method can effectively reduce vital communication cost, bandwidth issues, storage, data transmission cost and effective timely judicious analysis over the occurred activities and keep protection by using effective encryption methodology to remain attack free from any attacker or adversary, and provide confidentiality about patient’s privacy in the smart healthcare system.

The study aims to propose a novel model to define the role of spiritual leadership on the ethical climate for the banking industry. There are mainly three different stages in this model. Firstly, the criteria of each factor are selected with correlation coefficients by considering the balanced scorecard (BSC)-based linguistic evaluations. After that, these criteria are weighted by using interval type-2 (IT2) fuzzy decision-making trial and evaluation laboratory (DEMATEL). The third and the final stage aims to rank 5 biggest banks of Turkey which are quoted in İstanbul Stock Exchange. Within this framework, IT2 fuzzy technique for order preference by similarity to ideal solution (TOPSIS) approach is considered. The findings demonstrate that the spiritual leadership has a significant influence on the ethical climate. Altruistic love is the most important spiritual leadership dimension to improve ethical climate in the organization. On the other side, it is also concluded that private banks in Turkey are the most successful with respect to the ethical climate. The results give an idea that spiritual leader contributes to the improvement of the ties of love and respect among employees. The main reason is that altruistic love improves the judgement and sensitivity competencies of the ethical so that employees tend to be working in a more ethical way.

Classification problem is an important research direction in machine learning. Nonparallel support vector machine (NPSVM) is an important classifier used to solve classification problems. It is widely used because of its structural risk minimization principle, kernel trick, and sparsity. When solving multi-class classification problems, NPSVM will encounter the problem of sample noises, low discrimination speed and unrecognized regions, which will affect its performance. In this paper, based on the multi-class NPSVM model, two improvements are made, and a directed acyclic graph fuzzy nonparallel support vector machine (DAG-F-NPSVM) model is established. On the one hand, for the noises that may exist in the data set, the density information is used to add fuzzy membership to the samples, so that the contribution of each samples to the classification is treated differently. On the other hand, in order to reduce the decision time and solve the problem of unrecognized regions, the theory of directed acyclic graph (DAG) is introduced. Finally, the advantages of the new model in classification accuracy and decision speed is verified through UCI machine learning standard data set experiments. Finally, Friedman test and Bonferroni-Dunn test are used to verify the statistical significance of this new method.

In the following process, in order to improve the driving safety and road utilization of the adaptive cruise control (ACC) system, a variable time headway spacing strategy was studied. In view of the fact that the variable spacing strategy cannot adapt to the complex and variable deceleration conditions, an improved variable time headway strategy is proposed, which changes with the deceleration time and deceleration of the preceding vehicle. Based on this, the upper controller of adaptive cruise control based on model predictive control is designed, and numerical simulation of the variable time headway spacing strategy is performed, which verifies the effectiveness of the improved variable time headway strategy. The results show that the spacing strategy proposed in this paper can more smoothly keep up with the preceding vehicle, and improve driving safety, comfort and road utilization.

Many classification problems contain shape information from input features, such as monotonic, convex, and concave. In this research, we propose a new classifier, called Shape-Restricted Support Vector Machine (SR-SVM), which takes the component-wise shape information to enhance classification accuracy. There exists vast research literature on monotonic classification covering monotonic or ordinal shapes. Our proposed classifier extends to handle convex and concave types of features, and combinations of these types. While standard SVM uses linear separating hyperplanes, our novel SR-SVM essentially constructs non-parametric and nonlinear separating planes subject to component-wise shape restrictions. We formulate SR-SVM classifier as a convex optimization problem and solve it using an active-set algorithm. The approach applies basis function expansions on the input and effectively utilizes the standard SVM solver. We illustrate our methodology using simulation and real world examples, and show that SR-SVM improves the classification performance with additional shape information of input.

Pavement crack assessment is an important indicator for evaluating road health. However, due to the dark color of the asphalt pavement and the texture characteristics of the pavement, current asphalt pavement crack detection technology cannot meet the requirements of accuracy and efficiency. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end multi-scale full convolutional neural network to achieve the semantic segmentation of cracks in road images by learning the crack characteristics in the complex fine grain background of asphalt pavement. The method uses DenseNet and deconvolution network framework to achieve pixel-level detection and fuses features learned from different scales of convolutional kernels through a full convolutional network to obtain richer information on multi-scale features, allowing more detailed representation of crack features in high-resolution images. And the back end joins the SVM classifier to achieve crack classification after crack segmentation. Then we create a road test standard data set containing 12 cracks and evaluate it on the data. The experimental results show that the method achieves good segmentation effect for 12 types of cracks, and the crack segmentation for asphalt pavement is better than the most advanced methods.

Service accessibility can be used to describe the travel time of passengers between different nodes, and opportunities to get transportation services in the high-speed railway (HSR) system. Based on the traditional train line planning theory, this paper introduces the transportation service accessibility index, and propose a new nonlinear passenger train line planning model, which aims to maximize the service accessibility, as well as minimize the operational cost of railway company. The model is transformed into a single-objective model, and then we design a harmony search algorithm to solve it. Finally, the model is validated by a numerical example. The results of this model as well as the scenarios of the single-objective models for minimizing operational costs and maximizing service accessibility are compared. From the perspective of service frequency and accessibility of each nodes, we know that the proposed method can balance conflicts between average speed between large nodes and service frequency of small and medium size nodes in high-speed railway network.

The economic development of any country is closely linked with the consumption of energy. Therefore, international policies encourage increasing penetration of renewable energy sources (RES) into the electrical grid in order to reduce CO₂ emissions and cover ever-increasing demands. However, high variance of RES complicates their integration into power systems and complicates their transition from central to distributed energy sources. On the other hand, increasing the penetration of RES in electrical networks stimulates the demand for large capacity for energy storage. This paper presents a new approach to optimize the size of on-grid renewable energy systems integrated to pumped storage system using Salp Swarm Algorithm (SSA). This approach allows the examination of various energy sources and their combination to handle the optimal configuration of the hybrid system. The simulation and optimization process of the studied system have been carried out by MATLAB programming. The impact of the system under study on the grid is examined according to the power exchange values between the system and the grid. Moreover, different scenarios have been introduced for optimal operation. The simulation results indicate that these hybrid systems can reduce power exchange with the grid and ensure that the proposed system is economically and environmentally feasible. Furthermore, the results indicate the technical feasibility of seawater hydroelectric power plants in increasing the capacity of the electric grid to allow for high penetration of RES. Finally, the results showed that the best minimum value of the objective function is 3.9113 and showed that CO₂ emission can be reduced about 29.65% per year compared to the conventional power plants.

As the environment issue is put on the agenda, air pollution also concerns a lot. Nitrogen oxide (NOx) an is important factor which affects air pollution and is also the main gas emissions of the smoke and waste gas of FCC unit in petrochemical industry. It is important to accurately predict the NOx emission in advance for petrochemical industry to avoid air pollution incidents. In this paper, convolutional neural network (CNN) and long short-term memory (LSTM) are combined to predict the NOx emission in Fluid Catalytic Cracking unit (FCC unit). Convolutional-LSTM (CLSTM) is able to extract the spatial and temporal features which are essential information in the prediction of the NOx emission. The features in the factors of production which would affect the NOx emission are extracted by CNN which prepares time series data for LSTM. The LSTM layer is connected after CNN to model the irregular trends in time series. CNN, Multi-layer perception (MLP), rand forest (RF), support vector machine (SVM) and LSTM are implemented as baseline models. The results from the proposed CLSTM model showed better performance than all the baseline models. The mean absolute error and root mean square error for CLSTM were calculated with the values of 16.8267 and 23.7089 which are the lowest among all the models. The Pearson correlation coefficient and R2 for the proposed CLSTM model are calculated with the value of 0.9263, 0.8237 which are the highest among all the models. Furthermore, the residual graphs indicate the well matched performance between the observations and the predictions. The study provides a model reference for forecasting the NOx concentration emitted by FCC unit in petrochemical industry.

The traffic flow prediction using cellular automata (CA) is a trendy research domain that identified the potential of CA in modelling the traffic flow. CA is a technique, which utilizes the basic units for describing the overall behaviour of complicated systems. The CA model poses a benefit for defining the characteristics of traffic flow. This paper proposes a modified CA model to reveal the prediction of traffic flows at the signalised intersection. Based on the CA model, the traffic density and the average speed are computed for studying the characteristics and spatial evolution of traffic flow in signalised intersection. Moreover, a CA model with a self-organizing traffic signal system is devised by proposing a new optimization model for controlling the traffic rules. The Sunflower Cat Optimization (SCO) algorithm is employed for efficiently predicting traffic. The SCO is designed by integrating the Sunflower optimization algorithm (SFO) and Cat swarm optimization (CSO) algorithm. Also, the fitness function is devised, which helps to guide the control rules evaluated by traffic simulation using the CA model. Thus, the cellular automaton is optimized using the SCO algorithm for predicting the traffic flows. The proposed Sunflower Cat Optimization-based cellular automata (SCO-CA) outperformed other methods with minimal travel time, distance, average traffic density, and maximal average speed.

As an important expanded of the classical formal concept, the three-way formal concept analysis integrates more information with the three-way decision theory. However, to the best of our knowledge, few scholars have studied the intuitionistic fuzzy three-way formal concept analysis. This paper proposes an intuitionistic fuzzy three-way formal concept analysis model based on the attribute correlation degree. To achieve this, we comprehensively analyze the composition of attribute correlation degree in the intuitionistic fuzzy environment, and introduce the corresponding calculation methods for different situations, as well as prove the related properties. Furthermore, we investigate the intuitionistic fuzzy three-way concept lattice ((IF3WCL) of object-induced and attribute-induced. Then, the relationship between the IF3WCL and the positive, negative and boundary domains in the three-way decision are discussed. In addition, considering the final decision problem of boundary objects, the secondary decision strategy of boundary objects is obtained for IF3WCL. Finally, a numerical example of multinational company investment illustrates the effectiveness of the proposed model. In this paper, we systematically study the IF3WCL, and give a quantitative analysis method of formal concept decision along with its connection with three-way decision, which provides new ideas for the related research.

A webshell is a common tool for network intrusion. It has the characteristics of considerable threat and good concealment. An attacker obtains the management authority of web services through the webshell to penetrate and control web applications smoothly. Because webshell and common web page features are almost identical, it can evade detection by traditional firewalls and anti-virus software. Moreover, with the application of various anti-detection feature hiding techniques to the webshell, it is difficult to detect new patterns in time based on the traditional signature matching method. Webshell detection has been proposed based on deep learning. First, a dataset is opcoded, and the source code and opcode code features are fused. Second, the processed dataset is reduced using the SRNN and an attention mechanism, and the capsule network improves complete predictions for unknown pages. Experiments prove that the algorithm has higher detection efficiency and accuracy than traditional webshell detection methods, and it can also detect new types of webshell with a certain probability.

Social network analysis offers an understanding of our modern world, and it affords the ability to represent, analyze and even simulate complex structures. While an unweighted model can be used for online communities, trust or friendship networks should be analyzed with weighted models. To analyze social networks, it is essential to produce realistic social models. However, there are serious differences between social network models and real-life data in terms of their fundamental statistical parameters. In this paper, a genetic algorithm (GA)-based social network improvement method is proposed to produce social networks more similar to real-life data sets. First, it creates a social model based on existing studies in the literature, and then it improves the model with the proposed GA-based approach based on the similarity of the average degree, the k-nearest neighbor, the clustering coefficient, degree distribution and link overlap. This study can be used to model the structural and statistical properties of large-scale societies more realistically. The performance results show that our approach can reduce the dissimilarity between the created social networks and the real-life data sets in terms of their primary statistical properties. It has been shown that the proposed GA-based approach can be used effectively not only in unweighted networks but also in weighted networks.

Vague sets are a further extension of fuzzy sets. In rough set theory, target concept can be characterized by different rough approximation spaces when it is a vague concept. The uncertainty measure of vague sets in rough approximation spaces is an important issue. If the uncertainty measure is not accurate enough, different rough approximation spaces of a vague concept may possess the same result, which makes it impossible to distinguish these approximation spaces for charactering a vague concept strictly. In this paper, this problem will be solved from the perspective of similarity. Firstly, based on the similarity between vague information granules(VIGs), we proposed an uncertainty measure with strong distinguishing ability called rough vague similarity (RVS). Furthermore, by studying the multi-granularity rough approximations of a vague concept, we reveal the change rules of RVS with the changing granularities and conclude that the RVS between any two rough approximation spaces can degenerate to granularity measure and information measure. Finally, a case study and related experiments are listed to verify that RVS possesses a better performance for reflecting differences among rough approximation spaces for describing a vague concept.

The social web appears to enrich human lives by providing effective applications for online social interactions. Microblogs are one of the most important applications of the social Web. The Microbloggers who influence the social community users through their content in the form of tweets are known as the influential microbloggers. The identification of such influential microbloggers has vast applications in advertising, online marketing, corporate communication, information dissemination, etc. This paper investigates the problem of identifying influential microbloggers by proposing MIPPLA (Model to identify Influential using Productivity, Popularity and Link Analysis) model which integrates the modules of Productivity and Popularity. The Productivity module considers a micro-blogger’s activity and the Popularity module identifies a microbloggers influence in an online social community. In addition, we modify the classic PageRank by utilizing the Twitter features such as retweet, mention, and reply for ranking the influential users. The proposed approaches are evaluated using real-world social networks. The results prove that the MIPPLA model efficiently identifies and ranks the top influential users in an effective manner as compared to the existing techniques.

This paper is concerned with aspects of the analytical fuzzy solutions of the parabolic Volterra partial integro-differential equations under generalized Hukuhara partial differentiability and it consists of two parts. The first part of this paper deals with aspects of background knowledge in fuzzy mathematics, with emphasis on the generalized Hukuhara partial differentiability. The existence and uniqueness of the solutions of the fuzzy Volterra partial integro-differential equations by considering the type of [gH - p]-differentiability of solutions are proved in this part. The second part is concerned with the central themes of this paper, using the fuzzy Laplace transform method for solving the fuzzy parabolic Volterra partial integro-differential equations with emphasis on the type of [gH - p]-differentiability of solution. We test the effectiveness of method by solving some fuzzy Volterra partial integro-differential equations of parabolic type.

Slime mould algorithm (SMA) is a novel metaheuristic that simulates foraging behavior of slime mould. Regarding its drawbacks and properties, a hybrid optimization (BTβSMA) based on improved SMA is proposed to produce the higher-quality optimal results. Brownian motion and tournament selection mechanism are introduced into the basic SMA to improve the exploration capability. Moreover, a local search algorithm (Adaptive β-hill climbing, AβHC) is hybridized with the improved SMA. It is considered from boosting the exploitation trend. The proposed BTβSMA algorithm is evaluated in two main phases. Firstly, the two improved hybrid variants (BTβSMA-1 and BTβSMA-2) are compared with the basic SMA algorithm through 16 benchmark functions. Also, the performance of winner is further evaluated through comparisons with 7 state-of-the-art algorithms. The simulation results report fitness and computation time. The convergence curve and boxplot visualize the effects of fitness. The comparison results on the function optimization suggest that BTβSMA is superior to competitors. Wilcoxon rank-sum test is also employed to investigate the significance of the results. Secondly, the applicability on real-world tasks is proved by solving structure engineering design problems and training multilayer perceptrons. The numerical results indicate the merits of the BTβSMA algorithm in terms of solution precision.

On-time recovery and treatment of disease is always desirable. The use of Machine learning in health-care has grown very fast to diagnosis the different kinds of diseases in the past few years. In such a diagnosis, past and real-time data are playing very crucial role in using data mining techniques. Still, we are lacking in diagnosing the emotional mental disturbance accurately in the early stages. Thus,the initial diagnosis of depression expressively stances a great problem for both,researchers and clinical professionals. We have addressed the said problem in our proposed work using Pipeline Machine Learning technique where people based on emotional stages have been effectively classified into different groups in e-healthcare. To implement Hybrid classification, a well known machine learning multi-feature hybrid classifier is used by having the emotional stimulation in form of negative or positive people. In order to improve classification, an Ensemble Learning Algorithm is used which helps in choosing the more suitable features from the available genres-emotion data on online media. Additionally, Hold out validation method has been to split the dataset for training and testing of the predictive model. Further, performance evaluation measures have been applied to check the proposed system evaluation. This study is done on Genres-Tags MovieLens dataset. The experimental results show that applied ensemble method provides optimal classification performance by choosing the best subset of features. The said results proved the excellency of the proposed system which comes from the choosing most related features selected by the Integrated Learning algorithm. Additionally, suggested approach is used to accurately and effectively diagnose the depression in its early stage. It will help in recovery and treatment of depressed people. We conclude that use of the suggested method is highly suitable in all aspects of e-healthcare for depress stimulation.

In this paper, the matters of dissipativity and finite time synchronization for memristor-based neural networks (MNNs) with mixed time-varying discontinuities are investigated. Firstly, under the framework of extending Filippov differential inclusion theory, several effective new criteria are derived. Then, the global dissipativity of Filippov solution to neural networks is proved by using generalized Halanay inequality and matrix measure method. Secondly, some novel sufficient conditions are introduced to guarantee the finite-time synchronization of the drive-response MNNs based on a simple Lyapunov function and two different feedback controllers. Finally, several numerical examples are given to verify the validity of the theoretical results.