Intelligent counting under information imprecision. Applications to intelligent systems and decision support (Q694556)

The cardinality of a fuzzy set can be defined in various ways, generally leading to a fuzzy set of cardinal numbers. The author's earlier monograph [Vaguely defined objects. Representations, fuzzy sets and nonclassical cardinality theory. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers (1996; Zbl 0856.04002)] included the development of key properties of these fuzzy cardinalities from a strictly theoretical perspective. The book under review takes a much more applied view of the topic and is careful to provide informal justifications for the various definitions in terms of the ways in which humans appear to count the elements of sets given by imprecise descriptions. The motivation in terms of applications results in a very different presentation from the work cited above and the book takes account of recent work on the subject, providing an extensive set of references to work on fuzzy cardinalities from the earliest work up to 2011. An earlier volume in the same series by the author [Cardinalities of fuzzy sets. Berlin: Springer (2003; Zbl 1028.03043)] also presented the theory of fuzzy cardinalities. The book under review is divided into two parts. Part I gives an overview of the well-known theory of fuzzy sets. This concentrates on standard fuzzy sets, but one chapter also covers both interval-valued fuzzy sets and the I-fuzzy sets which are also known as intuituionistic fuzzy sets in the sense of Atanassov. The dependence of many constructions on triangular norms and conorms is described. Emphasising definitions and statements of essential properties of the various operations, Part I includes several small examples from areas such as database querying and fuzzy control. The second part of the book, about 100 pages, gathers together different ways in which to assign a fuzzy cardinality to a fuzzy set. As described in the Introduction, the basic concepts were published by Zadeh and by others in 1979--1983. These are described together with generalizations based on triangular norms and extensions to interval-valued fuzzy sets and I-fuzzy sets. The focus is on the finite case but a short final chapter reviews extensions to cardinalities of infinite fuzzy sets. Applications of fuzzy cardinalities and computational examples are presented in another chapter which also gives a short bibliography including further applications.