Uncertainty measures for fuzzy relations and their applications

Relations and relation matrices are important concepts in set theory and intelligent computation. Some general uncertainty measures for fuzzy relations are proposed by generalizing Shannon's information entropy. Then, the proposed measures are used to calculate the diversity quantity of multiple classifier systems and the granularity of granulated problem spaces, respectively. As a diversity measure, it is shown that the fusion system whose classifiers are of little similarity produces a great uncertainty quantity, which means that much complementary information is achieved with a diverse multiple classifier system. In granular computing, a "coarse-fine'' order is introduced for a family of problem spaces with the proposed granularity measures. The problem space that is finely granulated will get a great uncertainty quantity compared with the coarse problem space. Based on the observation, we employ the proposed measure to evaluate the significance of numerical attributes for classification. Each numerical attribute generates a fuzzy similarity relation over the sample space. We compute the condition entropy of a numerical attribute or a set of numerical attribute relative to the decision, where the greater the condition entropy is, the less important the attribute subset is. A forward greedy search algorithm for numerical feature selection is constructed with the proposed measure. Experimental results show that the proposed method presents an efficient and effective solution for numerical feature analysis. (c) 2006 Elsevier B. V. All rights reserved.