Construction and generation of distance and similarity measures for intuitionistic fuzzy sets and various applications

Abstract

The distance measure between intuitionistic fuzzy sets (IFSs) is a concept of very contemporary interest among the researchers in the field of decision-makings, such as pattern recognition, medical diagnosis, and multiattribute decision-making (MADM) problems. Consequently, diverse distance measures are developed and used in determining the similarity and dissimilarity between IFSs. In the existing methods, the distance measures are calculated based on the geometry of the IFSs. However, the IFSs hold information about the elements in a set. As such, some of the existing distance measures are misleading and unreasonable. Hence, in this paper, a nonlinear distance formula is devised to follow the problem definition. Further, by explicitly proving the distance properties, it is being established that the distance formula is a distance measure. Further, theories for the construction of distance measures are developed. The convex combination of two distance measures is also a distance measure is being proved explicitly. Furthermore, based on the proposed distance measures, similarity measures have been developed. Aside from that, an intriguing idea has been introduced, namely, that an infinite number of distance measures can be constructed from a given pair of distance measures. Additionally, the proposed distance and similarity measures are applied to a variety of problems, including medical diagnosis, pattern recognition, and a MADM problem in COVID-19 face mask selection, where the legitimacy and applicability of the proposed advanced distance measure is demonstrated.