Switching between type-2 fuzzy sets and intuitionistic fuzzy sets: an application in medical diagnosis

When dealing with vagueness, there are situations when there is insufficient information available, making it impossible to satisfactorily evaluate membership. The intuitionistic fuzzy set theory is more suitable than fuzzy sets to deal with such problem. In 1996, Atanassov proposed the mapping from intuitionistic fuzzy sets to fuzzy sets. Furthermore, intuitionistic fuzzy sets are isomorphic to interval valued fuzzy sets, and interval valued fuzzy sets are regarded as the special cases of type-2 fuzzy sets in recently studies. However, their discussions are not only hardly comprehending but also lacking the reliable applications. In this study, the advantage of type-2 fuzzy sets is employed, and the switching relation between type-2 fuzzy sets and intuitionistic fuzzy sets is defined axiomatically. The switching results are applied to show the usefulness of the proposed method in pattern recognition and medical diagnosis reasoning.