Thursday, April 30, 2009

#60. Old paper by Witold Pedrycz

I presume a thorough search would discover many interesting papers by Pedrycz in the net. This one makes a nice reading:

Witold Pedrycz (2007). Collaborative and knowledge-based fuzzy clustering. International Journal of Innovative
Computing, Information and Control
3, 1-12.

The content is much more `philosophical' than `technical', explaining some ideas from his `human-centric' view of clustering techniques. I recall distinctly Pedrycz's talk at IFSA'05 (Dubois's as well, but that's material for another post). A catchy example of Pedrycz's was a system which would learn to classify your digital picture collection. I thought: Now that's definitely a clustering problem and how far it is from the typical view of clustering in statistical books and journals!


More technical material can be found in Pedrycz's book (link to Google Books).

Witold Pedrycz (2005). Knowledge-based clustering: from data to information granules. Wiley, Hoboken.

Saturday, April 25, 2009

#59. Old paper by Lotfi Zadeh

Related to the Singpurwalla-Booker paper just below is, of course, Zadeh's original paper on probability of fuzzy events.

Lotfi A. Zadeh (1968). Probability measures of fuzzy events. Journal of Mathematical Analysis and Applications 23, 421-427.


More papers by Zadeh can be found here.


A nice Powerpoint presentation based on (the short version of) Dubois and Prade's Fuzzy sets and probability: Misunderstandings, bridges and gaps, where fuzzy events play a role, can be found here.


If that weren't enough, Gert de Cooman recently discussed the issue here in his blog.

Friday, April 24, 2009

#58. Old paper by Singpurwalla and Booker

I have often googled to find a free copy of this paper since I started this blog.

Nozer Singpurwalla, Jane A. Booker (2004). Membership functions and probability measures of fuzzy sets. Journal of the American Statistical Association 99, 867-877.

Here is my review of it for Mathematical Reviews.

As I say there, I believe that it will be remembered as the first attempt to transmute fuzzy sets into something palatable to hardcore Bayesians.

#57. Old chapter by Thoralf Skolem

Via Project Euclid, one can access Skolem's Abstract set theory (70-page lecture notes published by the University of Notre Dame). Its Chapter 18 summarizes very briefly Skolem's approach to proving the consistency of set theory within Lukasiewicz [0,1]-valued logic.

Just a curiosity, but--

Thoralf Skolem (1962). The possibility of set theory based on many-valued logic.

The whole volume can be downloaded chapter by chapter here.

Tuesday, April 21, 2009

#56. Old paper by Glen Meeden

Meeden co-authored the paper on fuzzy p-values which sadly seems to have made little or no impact in the fuzzy statistics community.

In this recent paper, he discusses his views on probability-possibility `translation'. In spite of the title, I say so because I think he means a possibility distribution when he says 'a fuzzy set'.

Meeden seems to be unaware of the literature in this topic, but anyway his approach has a rather Bayesian flavour by making it a loss-driven decision, and that's nice (although, a criticism in point is that his loss functions lack a fuzzy interpretation).

Glen Meeden (2008). Fuzzy set representation of a prior distribution. In: Pushing the limits of contemporary Statistics: Contributions in honor of Jayanta K. Ghosh, 82-88. Published by the IMS.


One further fuzzy preprint is:

Glen Meeden, Siamak Noorbaloochi. Hypotheses testing as a fuzzy set estimation problem. Available as a technical report from the University of Minnesota.


More papers of his can be found here.

Wednesday, April 15, 2009

#55. Old book by Nguyen and Wu

As it turns out, someone has uploaded Hung Nguyen and Berlin Wu's Fundamentals of statistics with fuzzy data (Springer, 2006) to direct download servers. I didn't put it there and I ignore who did it, in particular if he had the legal right to do so. If you are uncomfortable with that, or think that downloading the book may be illegal in your country, just use Google Books or inter-library loan instead.


Instructions: In this page, follow the "Rapidshare" link (if it doesn't work, try the "File Factory" link but the process is then more complex), then click on the button "Free user", wait for as long as you're asked to do, finally a button "Download" will appear, click on it. The PDF is compressed as a RAR file, so you will need a decompressor for it. If you haven't any, google for e.g. WinRAR and download a shareware version for free.

Tuesday, April 07, 2009

#54. Special issue on Fuzzy Sets and Statistics (CFP)

Computational Statistics and Data Analysis is preparing their second special issue on Fuzzy Sets and Statistics, this time with Ana Colubi, Didier Dubois and Frank Klawonn serving as guest editors.

The deadline is December 15th, 2009. However you may also be interested in submitting a conference version of the paper to the track Fuzzy Statistical Analysis of the 2nd International Workshop of the ERCIM Working Group on Computing & Statistics, in which case a prior deadline for 1-page abstracts is June 1st, 2009.

Update: July 31st, 2009.

Further info here and here, respectively.