Directional monotonicity of multidimensional fusion functions with respect to admissible orders

Abstract

The notion of directional monotonicity emerged as a relaxation of the monotonicity condition of aggregation functions. As the extension of aggregation functions to fuse more complex information than numeric data, directional monotonicity was extended to the framework of multidimensional data, with respect to the product order, which is a partial order. In this work, we present the notion of admissible order for multidimensional data and we define the concept of directional monotonicity for multidimensional fusion functions with respect to an admissible order. Moreover, we study the main properties of directionally monotone functions in this new context. We conclude that, while some of the properties are still valid (e.g. the set of directions of increasingness is still closed under convex combinations), some of the main ones no longer hold (e.g. there does not exist a finite set of directions that characterize standard monotonicity in terms of directional monotonicity).