Hesitant fuzzy β covering rough sets and applications in multi-attribute decision making

Abstract

In present paper, we put forward four types of hesitant fuzzy β covering rough sets (HFβCRSs) by uniting covering based rough sets (CBRSs) and hesitant fuzzy sets (HFSs). We firstly originate hesitant fuzzy β covering of the universe, which can induce two types of neighborhood to produce four types of HFβCRSs. We then make further efforts to probe into the properties of each type of HFβCRSs. Particularly, the relationships of each type of rough approximation operators w.r.t. two different hesitant fuzzy β coverings are groped. Moreover, the relationships between our proposed models and some other existing related models are established. Finally, we give an application model, an algorithm, and an illustrative example to elaborate the applications of HFβCRSs in multi-attribute decision making (MADM) problems. By making comparative analysis, the HFβCRSs models proposed by us are more general than the existing models of Ma and Yang and are more applicable than the existing models of Ma and Yang when handling hesitant fuzzy information.