Employing an Enhanced Interval Approach to encode words into Linear General Type-2 fuzzy sets for Computing With Words applications

In 1996, Zadeh coined Computing With Words (CWWs) to be a methodology in which words are used instead of numbers for computing and reasoning. One of the main challenges which faced the CWWs paradigm has been modelling words adequately. Mendel has pointed out that the CWWs paradigm should employ type-2 fuzzy logic to model words. This paper proposes employing an Enhanced Interval Approach (EIA) to create Linear General Type-2 (LGT2) fuzzy sets from Interval Type-2 (IT2) fuzzy sets to encode words for CWWs applications. We have performed experiments on 18 words belonging to 3 different linguistic variables (having 6 linguistic terms each). Interval data has been collected from 17 subjects and 18 linguistic terms have been modeled with IT2 fuzzy sets using EIA. The proposed conversion approach uses several key points within the parameters of IT2 fuzzy sets to redesign the linguistic variable using LGT2 fuzzy sets. Both IT2 and LGT2 fuzzy sets have been evaluated within a CWWs Framework, which aims to mimic the ability of humans to communicate and manipulate perceptions via words. The comparison results show that LGT2 fuzzy sets can be better than IT2 fuzzy sets in mimicking human reasoning as well as learning and adaptation since the progressive Root Mean Squared Error (RMSE) and Mean Absolute Percentage Error (MAPE) values for LGT2 based CWWs Framework converge faster and are lower than those for IT2 based CWWs Framework.