Granular Computing Approach to Two-Way Learning Based on Formal Concept Analysis in Fuzzy Datasets

Three-way decisions in generalized intuitionistic fuzzy environments: survey and challenges

Enhancing decision-making under risks is crucial in various fields, and three-way decision (3WD) methods have been extensively utilized and proven to be effective in numerous scenarios. However, traditional methods may not be sufficient when addressing intricate decision-making scenarios characterized by uncertain and ambiguous information. In response to this challenge, the generalized intuitionistic fuzzy set (IFS) theory extends the conventional fuzzy set theory by introducing two pivotal concepts, i.e., membership degrees and non-membership degrees. These concepts offer a more comprehensive means of portraying the relationship between elements and fuzzy concepts, thereby boosting the ability to model complex problems. The generalized IFS theory brings about heightened flexibility and precision in problem-solving, allowing for a more thorough and accurate description of intricate phenomena. Consequently, the generalized IFS theory emerges as a more refined tool for articulating fuzzy phenomena. The paper offers a thorough review of the research advancements made in 3WD methods within the context of generalized intuitionistic fuzzy (IF) environments. First, the paper summarizes fundamental aspects of 3WD methods and the IFS theory. Second, the paper discusses the latest development trends, including the application of these methods in new fields and the development of new hybrid methods. Furthermore, the paper analyzes the strengths and weaknesses of research methods employed in recent years. While these methods have yielded impressive outcomes in decision-making, there are still some limitations and challenges that need to be addressed. Finally, the paper proposes key challenges and future research directions. Overall, the paper offers a comprehensive and insightful review of the latest research progress on 3WD methods in generalized IF environments, which can provide guidance for scholars and engineers in the intelligent decision-making field with situations characterized by various uncertainties.

Lateralized Learning to Solve Complex Boolean Problems

Modern classifier systems can effectively classify targets that consist of simple patterns. However, they can fail to detect hierarchical patterns of features that exist in many real-world problems, such as understanding speech or recognizing object ontologies. Biological nervous systems have the ability to abstract knowledge from simple and small-scale problems in order to then apply it to resolve more complex problems in similar and related domains. It is thought that lateral asymmetry of biological brains allows modular learning to occur at different levels of abstraction, which can then be transferred between tasks. This work develops a novel evolutionary machine-learning (EML) system that incorporates lateralization and modular learning at different levels of abstraction. The results of analyzable Boolean tasks show that the lateralized system has the ability to encapsulate underlying knowledge patterns in the form of building blocks of knowledge (BBK). Lateralized abstraction transforms complex problems into simple ones by reusing general patterns (e.g., any parity problem becomes a sequence of the 2-bit parity problem). By enabling abstraction in evolutionary computation, the lateralized system is able to identify complex patterns (e.g., in hierarchical multiplexer (HMux) problems) better than existing systems.

Two-Way Concept-Cognitive Learning via Concept Movement Viewpoint

Representation and learning of concepts are critical problems in data science and cognitive science. However, the existing research about concept learning has one prevalent disadvantage: incomplete and complex cognitive. Meanwhile, as a practical mathematical tool for concept representation and concept learning, two-way learning (2WL) also has some issues leading to the stagnation of its related research: the concept can only learn from specific information granules and lacks a concept evolution mechanism. To overcome these challenges, we propose the two-way concept-cognitive learning (TCCL) method for enhancing the flexibility and evolution ability of 2WL for concept learning. We first analyze the fundamental relationship between two-way granule concepts in the cognitive system to build a novel cognitive mechanism. Furthermore, the movement three-way decision (M-3WD) method is introduced to 2WL to study the concept evolution mechanism via the concept movement viewpoint. Unlike the existing 2WL method, the primary consideration of TCCL is two-way concept evolution rather than information granules transformation. Finally, to interpret and help understand TCCL, an example analysis and some experiments on various datasets are carried out to demonstrate our method's effectiveness. The results show that TCCL is more flexible and less time-consuming than 2WL, and meanwhile, TCCL can also learn the same concept as the latter method in concept learning. In addition, from the perspective of concept learning ability, TCCL is more generalization of concepts than the granule concept cognitive learning model (CCLM).

Interval Dominance-Based Feature Selection for Interval-Valued Ordered Data

Dominance-based rough approximation discovers inconsistencies from ordered criteria and satisfies the requirement of the dominance principle between single-valued domains of condition attributes and decision classes. When the ordered decision system (ODS) is no longer single-valued, how to utilize the dominance principle to deal with multivalued ordered data is a promising research direction, and it is the most challenging step to design a feature selection algorithm in interval-valued ODS (IV-ODS). In this article, we first present novel thresholds of interval dominance degree (IDD) and interval overlap degree (IOD) between interval values to make the dominance principle applicable to an IV-ODS, and then, the interval-valued dominance relation in the IV-ODS is constructed by utilizing the above two developed parameters. Based on the proposed interval-valued dominance relation, the interval-valued dominance-based rough set approach (IV-DRSA) and their corresponding properties are investigated. Moreover, the interval dominance-based feature selection rules based on IV-DRSA are provided, and the relevant algorithms for deriving the interval-valued dominance relation and the feature selection methods are established in IV-ODS. To illustrate the effectiveness of the parameters variation on feature selection rules, experimental evaluation is performed using 12 datasets coming from the University of California-Irvine (UCI) repository.

The Linguistic Concept’s Reduction Methods under Symmetric Linguistic-Evaluation Information

Knowledge reduction is a crucial topic in formal concept analysis. There always exists uncertain, symmetric linguistic-evaluation information in social life, which leads to high complexity in the process of knowledge representation. In order to overcome this problem, we are focused on studying the linguistic-concept-reduction methods in an uncertain environment with fuzzy linguistic information. Based on three-way decisions and an attribute-oriented concept lattice, we construct a fuzzy-object-induced three-way attribute-oriented linguistic (FOEAL) concept lattice, which provides complementary conceptual structures of a three-way concept lattice with symmetric linguistic-evaluation information. Through the granular concept of the FOEAL lattice, we present the corresponding linguistic concept granular consistent set and granular reduction. Then, we further employ the linguistic concept discernibility matrix and discernibility function to calculate the granular reduction set. A similar issue on information entropy is investigated to introduce a method of entropy reduction for the FOEAL lattice, and the relation between the linguistic concept granular reduction and entropy reduction is discussed. The efficiency of the proposed method is depicted by some examples and comparative analysis.

Dynamic Dual-Threshold Virtual Machine Merging Method Based on Three-Way Decision

Cloud computing, an emerging computing paradigm, has been widely considered due to its high scalability and availability. An essential stage of cloud computing is the cloud virtual machine migration technology. Nevertheless, the current trigger timing of virtual machine migration in cloud data centers is inaccurate, resulting in insufficient virtual machine consolidation. Furthermore, the high and low workload fluctuations are also a potential symmetrical problem worthy of attention. This paper proposes a virtual machine energy-saving merging method based on a three-way decision (ESMM-3WD). Firstly, we need to calculate the load fluctuation of the physical machine and divide the load fluctuation into three parts. Furthermore, the corresponding mathematical model predicts the load according to the different classification categories. Then, the predicted load value is used to dynamically adjust the threshold to improve the virtual machine merge probability. Finally, the simulation experiment is carried out on the cloud computing simulation platform cloudsim plus. The experimental results show that the virtual machine energy-saving merging method based on the three-way decision proposed in this paper can better reduce the number of migrations, increase the number of physical machines shut down, better improve the probability of virtual machine merger, and achieve the purpose of reducing the energy consumption of the data center.

Attribute Network Representation Learning with Dual Autoencoders

The purpose of attribute network representation learning is to learn the low-dimensional dense vector representation of nodes by combining structure and attribute information. The current network representation learning methods have insufficient interaction with structure when learning attribute information, and the structure and attribute information cannot be well integrated. In this paper, we propose an attribute network representation learning method for dual-channel autoencoder. One channel is for the network structure, and adopting the multi-hop attention mechanism is used to capture the node’s high-order neighborhood information and calculate the neighborhood weight; The other channel is for the node attribute information, and a low-pass Laplace filter is designed to iteratively obtain the attribute information in the neighborhood of the node. The dual-channel autoencoder ensures the learning of structure and attribute information respectively. The adaptive fusion module is constructed in this method to increase the acquisition of important information through the consistency and difference constraints of two kinds of information. The method trains encoders by supervising the joint reconstruction of loss functions of two autoencoders. Based on the node clustering task on four authentic open data sets, and compared with eight network representation learning algorithms in clustering accuracy, standardized mutual information and running time of some algorithms, the experimental results show that the proposed method is superior and reasonable.

Constructing Adaptive Multi-Scale Feature via Transformer-Aware Patch for Occluded Person Re-Identification

Person re-identification (Re-ID) aims to retrieve a specific pedestrian across a multi-disjoint camera in a surveillance system. Most of the research is based on a strong assumption that images should contain a full human torso. However, it cannot be guaranteed that all the people have a clear foreground because they are out of constraint. In the real world, a variety of occluded situations frequently appear in video monitoring, which impedes the recognition process. To settle the occluded person Re-ID issue, a new Dual-Transformer symmetric architecture is proposed in this work, which can reduce the occluded impact and build a multi-scale feature. There are two contributions to our proposed model. (i) A Transformer-Aware Patch Searching (TAPS) module is devised to learn visible human region distribution using a multiheaded self-attention mechanism and construct a branch of distributed information attention scale. (ii) An Adaptive Visible-Part Cropping (AVPC) Strategy, with two steps of cropping and weakly-supervised learning, is used to generate a fine-scale visible image for another branch. Only ID labels are utilized to restrain TAPS and AVPC without any extra visible-part annotation. Extensive experiments are conducted on two occluded person Re-ID benchmarks, confirming that our approach performs a SOTA or comparable effect.

Advertising Decisions of Platform Supply Chains Considering Network Externalities and Fairness Concerns

With the popularization of platform economics, many manufacturers are shifting their operations from offline to online, forming platform supply chains (PSCs), which combine e-commerce with supply chain management. To study the influences of network externalities and fairness concerns on advertising strategies of the platform supply chain (PSC), we construct decentralized decision-making models, with and without fairness concerns. Then, we solve the optimal decisions regarding PSC and use numerical examples to verify the conclusions of the decision models. We further analyze the internal influences of advertising strategies on network externalities in the extended model. We find that the network externalities are beneficial to the PSC system, but the manufacturer’s fairness concerns are not beneficial to the PSC. The advertising strategies of the network platform are not affected by network externalities and fairness concerns. In the extended model, the manufacturer can obtain more profits, but the network platform yields less profit than the decentralized model without fairness concerns. Moreover, the more sensitive the network externalities are to the change in advertising strategies, the greater the profits for the PSC members.

A Novel Method for Decision Making by Double-Quantitative Rough Sets in Hesitant Fuzzy Systems

In some complex decision-making issues such as economy, management, and social development, decision makers are often hesitant to reach a consensus on the decision-making results due to different goals. How to reduce the influence of decision makers’ subjective arbitrariness on decision results is an inevitable task in decision analysis. Following the principle of improving the fault-tolerance capability, this paper firstly proposes the graded and the variable precision rough set approaches from a single-quantitative decision-making view in a hesitant fuzzy environment (HFEn). Moreover, in order to improve the excessive overlap caused by the high concentration of single quantization, we propose two kinds of double-quantitative decision-making methods by cross-considering relative quantitative information and absolute quantitative information. The proposal of this method not only solves the fuzzy system problem of people’s hesitation in the decision-making process, but also greatly enhances the fault-tolerant ability of the model in application. Finally, we further compare the approximation process and decision results of the single-quantitative models and the double-quantitative models, and explore some basic properties and corresponding decision rules of these models. Meanwhile, we introduce a practical example of housing purchase to expound and verify these theories, which shows that the application value of these theories is impressive.

Robust Multi-Label Classification with Enhanced Global and Local Label Correlation

Data representation is of significant importance in minimizing multi-label ambiguity. While most researchers intensively investigate label correlation, the research on enhancing model robustness is preliminary. Low-quality data is one of the main reasons that model robustness degrades. Aiming at the cases with noisy features and missing labels, we develop a novel method called robust global and local label correlation (RGLC). In this model, subspace learning reconstructs intrinsic latent features immune from feature noise. The manifold learning ensures that outputs obtained by matrix factorization are similar in the low-rank latent label if the latent features are similar. We examine the co-occurrence of global and local label correlation with the constructed latent features and the latent labels. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the classification performance with integrated information is statistically superior over a collection of state-of-the-art approaches across numerous domains. Additionally, the proposed model shows promising performance on multi-label when noisy features and missing labels occur, demonstrating the robustness of multi-label classification.

TEXT Analysis on Ocean Engineering Equipment Industry Policies in China between 2010 and 2020

The ocean engineering equipment industry is the foundation for the implementation of maritime strategy. China’s national departments at all levels have developed relevant ocean engineering equipment industry policies to promote the rapid development of the industry. By using 56 industrial policies issued between 2010 and 2020 as the research sample, we conducted an in-depth assessment of the external structural characteristics and structure of the main cooperation network for such policies using descriptive statistics and social network analysis. Based on a symmetric analysis method, the two-dimensional matrix of cooperation breadth and cooperation depth, together with the measurement of the issuing subject’s centrality, was used to analyze the evolution of the subject’s role in the network. The research shows that the development of China’s ocean engineering equipment industry policies can be divided into three stages, and there are the following problems during the development of policies: (1) some policies and regulations are imperfect; (2) the network of cooperation among joint issuers is limited; and (3) some policies are issued by multiple government departments, but there is a lack of specialized and unified management from an absolute core department. Based on the above problems, we present some suggestions for policy optimization at the end of this paper.

A Classification Model with Cognitive Reasoning Ability

In this paper, we study the classification problem of large data with many features and strong feature dependencies. This type of problem has shortcomings when handled by machine learning models. Therefore, a classification model with cognitive reasoning ability is proposed. The core idea is to use cognitive reasoning mechanism proposed in this paper to solve the classification problem of large structured data with multiple features and strong correlation between features, and then implements cognitive reasoning for features. The model has three parts. The first part proposes a Feature-to-Image algorithm for converting structured data into image data. The algorithm quantifies the dependencies between features, so as to take into account the impact of individual independent features and correlations between features on the prediction results. The second part designs and implements low-level feature extraction of the quantified features using convolutional neural networks. With the relative symmetry of the capsule network, the third part proposes a cognitive reasoning mechanism to implement high-level feature extraction, feature cognitive reasoning, and classification tasks of the data. At the same time, this paper provides the derivation process and algorithm description of cognitive reasoning mechanism. Experiments show that our model is efficient and outperforms comparable models on the category prediction experiment of ADMET properties of five compounds.This work will provide a new way for cognitive computing of intelligent data analysis.

An Improved Three-Way Clustering Based on Ensemble Strategy

As a powerful data analysis technique, clustering plays an important role in data mining. Traditional hard clustering uses one set with a crisp boundary to represent a cluster, which cannot solve the problem of inaccurate decision-making caused by inaccurate information or insufficient data. In order to solve this problem, three-way clustering was presented to show the uncertainty information in the dataset by adding the concept of fringe region. In this paper, we present an improved three-way clustering algorithm based on an ensemble strategy. Different to the existing clustering ensemble methods by using various clustering algorithms to produce the base clustering results, the proposed algorithm randomly extracts a feature subset of samples and uses the traditional clustering algorithm to obtain the diverse base clustering results. Based on the base clustering results, labels matching is used to align all clustering results in a given order and voting method is used to obtain the core region and the fringe region of the three way clustering. The proposed algorithm can be applied on the top of any existing hard clustering algorithm to generate the base clustering results. As examples for demonstration, we apply the proposed algorithm on the top of K-means and spectral clustering, respectively. The experimental results show that the proposed algorithm is effective in revealing cluster structures.

Rough set-based entropy measure with weighted density outlier detection method

The rough set theory is a powerful numerical model used to handle the impreciseness and ambiguity of data. Many existing multigranulation rough set models were derived from the multigranulation decision-theoretic rough set framework. The multigranulation rough set theory is very desirable in many practical applications such as high-dimensional knowledge discovery, distributional information systems, and multisource data processing. So far research works were carried out only for multigranulation rough sets in extraction, selection of features, reduction of data, decision rules, and pattern extraction. The proposed approach mainly focuses on anomaly detection in qualitative data with multiple granules. The approximations of the dataset will be derived through multiequivalence relation, and then, the rough set-based entropy measure with weighted density method is applied on every object and attribute. For detecting outliers, threshold value fixation is performed based on the estimated weight. The performance of the algorithm is evaluated and compared with existing outlier detection algorithms. Datasets such as breast cancer, chess, and car evaluation have been taken from the UCI repository to prove its efficiency and performance.

A Quantum Language-Inspired Tree Structural Text Representation for Semantic Analysis

Text representation is an important topic in the field of natural language processing, which can effectively transfer knowledge to downstream tasks. To extract effective semantic information from text with unsupervised methods, this paper proposes a quantum language-inspired tree structural text representation model to study the correlations between words with variable distance for semantic analysis. Combining the different semantic contributions of associated words in different syntax trees, a syntax tree-based attention mechanism is established to highlight the semantic contributions of non-adjacent associated words and weaken the semantic weight of adjacent non-associated words. Moreover, the tree-based attention mechanism includes not only the overall information of entangled words in the dictionary but also the local grammatical structure of word combinations in different sentences. Experimental results on semantic textual similarity tasks show that the proposed method obtains significant performances over the state-of-the-art sentence embeddings.

Rough set theory and attribute reduction in interval-set information system

As an extension of traditional information systems, interval-set information systems have a strong expressive ability to describe uncertain information. Study of the rough set theory and the attribute reduction of interval-set information system are worth discussing. Here, the granularity structure of similar equivalence classes in an interval-set information system is mined, and an attribute reduction algorithm is constructed. The upper and lower approximation operators in the interval-set information system are defined. The accuracy and roughness are determined by these operators. At the same time, using rough sets, a concept of three branches of rough sets on the interval-set information system is constructed. The concepts of attribute dependency and attribute importance are induced by the positive number domain of the three branch domains, and they then lead to the attribute reduction algorithm. Experiments on the UCI datasets show that the uncertainty measure proposed in this paper is sensitive to the attributes and can effectively reduce redundant information of the interval-set information system.

Beam-Influenced Attribute Selector for Producing Stable Reduct

Attribute reduction is a critical topic in the field of rough set theory. Currently, to further enhance the stability of the derived reduct, various attribute selectors are designed based on the framework of ensemble selectors. Nevertheless, it must be pointed out that some limitations are concealed in these selectors: (1) rely heavily on the distribution of samples; (2) rely heavily on the optimal attribute. To generate the reduct with higher stability, a novel beam-influenced selector (BIS) is designed based on the strategies of random partition and beam. The scientific novelty of our selector can be divided into two aspects: (1) randomly partition samples without considering the distribution of samples; (2) beam-based selections of features can save the selector from the dependency of the optimal attribute. Comprehensive experiments using 16 UCI data sets show the following: (1) the stability of the derived reducts may be significantly enhanced by using our selector; (2) the reducts generated based on the proposed selector can provide competent performance in classification tasks.