Estimating the potential willingness of the state to use military force based on the Sugeno fuzzy integral

Abstract

Estimation of the potential willingness of the state to use military force is an integral part of the analysis of international relations and the preparation of key decisions in in security sphere. Our problem was to develop a method for numerically estimating the potential willingness of any state to use military force. This method should take into account a large number of quantitative and qualitative criteria, the uncertainty of their relationships, as well as the uncertainty of the initial data, some of which can only be obtained with the help of experts. Our analysis has shown that the known methods have a number of serious shortcomings. We proposed to solve this problem based on the representation of partial estimations of states in the form of fuzzy sets, and the importance of criteria in the form of a fuzzy measure. We also proposed to aggregate the partial estimations using the Sugeno fuzzy integral. We developed a hierarchical structure of estimation criteria, determined the importance of the criteria, built an observation channel based on the Harrington curve to obtain input estimations, and also developed an aggregation algorithm. As a result, we calculated estimations for 137 states and examined their potential willingness to use military force. The results disclose new aspects of using fuzzy-integral calculus to construct hierarchical models of multi-criteria estimating, and also demonstrate the possibility of using artificial intelligence methods to obtain numerical estimations in the sphere of international relations.