A Novel Correlation Coefficients between Pythagorean Fuzzy Sets and Its Applications to Decision-Making Processes

Pythagorean fuzzy set (PFS) is one of the most successful in terms of representing comprehensively uncertain and vague information. Considering that the correlation coefficient plays an important role in statistics and engineering sciences, in this paper, after pointing out the weakness of the existing correlation coefficients between intuitionistic fuzzy sets (IFSs), we propose a novel correlation coefficient and weighted correlation coefficient formulation to measure the relationship between two PFSs. Pairs of membership, nonmembership, and hesitation degree as a vector representation with the two elements have been considered during formulation. Numerical examples of pattern recognition and medical diagnosis have been taken to demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed approach. Results computed by the proposed approach are compared with the existing indices. (C) 2016 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.