A novel method to information fusion in multi-source incomplete interval-valued data via conditional information entropy: Application to mutual information entropy based attribute reduction

Abstract

In the era of explosive data growth, data sources and volumes are rapidly increasing. A multi-source data refers to information from multi-sources. However, not every source of information is equally important; some sources are more important and some are essentially worthless. Therefore, it is very meaningful to study how to select the most valuable sources and to efficiently fuse information. Multi-source incomplete interval-valued data (MSIIV-data) is an important kind of multi-source data. This paper proposes a novel method to information fusion in MSIIV-data via conditional information entropy (CIE) and considers its application to attribute reduction based on mutual information entropy. First, the distance between two information values for each incomplete interval-valued data is defined, the neighborhood classes with a tunable parameter are obtained, and the neighborhood granularity structure is established. Then, a source selection method is given via CIE, which is used to fuse MSIIV-data into single-source incomplete interval-valued data (SSIIV-data). Based on the minimization of CIE, this method allows worthy and reliable information sources to be chosen. Moreover, an attribute reduction algorithm (denoted as MMQPSO) for the fused SSIIV-data is proposed by means of combining mutual information entropy and QPSO-algorithm. Finally, experiments are done to validate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithms. The results of experiment and statistical test on 12 datasets show that the proposed algorithms have certain feasibility and advancement than 6 other advanced algorithms.