A Novel Distance between Vague Sets and Its Applications in Decision Making

A novel distance between vague sets (VSs) is presented after the inadequacies of existing distance measures between vague sets are analyzed by artificial vague sets. The proposed method investigates the assignment of degree of hesitation to the membership and nonmembership degree, and the properties are also discussed. The performances of the new method are illustrated by pattern classification problem. Finally, the proposed method is applied into multicriteria fuzzy decision making, where the linear programming method is taken to generate optimal weights for every criterion and the best alternative is obtained by the weighted sum of distance measures between each alternative and the idea alternative with respect to a set of criteria. The experimental results show the effectiveness of the proposed method.