On construction methods of (interval-valued) general grouping functions

Abstract

Recently, several theoretical and applied studies on grouping functions and overlap functions appeared in the literature, mainly because of their flexibility when comparing them with the popular aggregation operators t-conorms and t-norms, respectively. Additionally, they constitute richer classes of disjunction/conjunction operations than t-norms and t-conorms. In particular, grouping functions have been applied as the disjunction operator in several problems, like decision making based on fuzzy preference relations. In this case, when performing pairwise comparisons, grouping functions allow one to evaluate the measure of the amount of evidence in favor of either of two given alternatives. However, grouping functions are not associative. Then, in order to allow them to be applied in n-dimensional problems, such as the pooling layer of neural networks, some generalizations were introduced, namely, n-dimensional grouping functions and the more flexible general grouping functions, the latter for enlarging the scope of applications. Then, in order to h andle uncertainty on the definition of the membership functions in real-life problems, n-dimensional and general interval-valued grouping functions were proposed. This paper aims at providing new constructions methods of general (interval-valued) grouping functions, also providing some examples.