1. Introduction
The process of decision making, which involves choice making by identifying, information gathering, and evaluation of alternative resolution, is a challenging procedure due to incomplete information. A dependable method for carrying out decision making is by means of fuzzy set because of incomplete information in the process. Pattern recognition, decision making, medical diagnosis, and selection process, among others, have been explored with the instrumentality of fuzzy logic. By definition, a fuzzy set [
1] defined in a set
is categorized by a membership degree symbolized by
, which associates numbers from an interval,
to the elements of
. Nonetheless, fuzzy set is inadequate since it considers only the degree of membership without minding any other deciding parameters. As a follow-up to this weakness, Atanassov [
2] developed a concept called
intuitionistic fuzzy set (IFS), which considers a degree of membership
in addition to a degree of nonmembership
such that either
or
. Several applications of IFSs has been discussed based on various information measures. Pattern recognition problems [
3,
4] and medical diagnosis [
5] have been carried out based on intuitionistic fuzzy similarity measures. Other sundry approaches such as intuitionistic fuzzy distance measures, intuitionistic fuzzy relations, and intuitionistic fuzzy correlation measures in have been used to crack a number of problems in pattern recognition [
6,
7] and decision making [
8], among others. A method of group decision making by means of intuitionistic fuzzy aggregation operators has been deliberated [
9]. A number of applicable distance measures under IFSs were considered in [
10,
11,
12].
The clear drawback of IFS is its restriction that the summation of the degrees of membership and nonmembership must not be bigger than one. Consequentially to this inadequacy, the term
IFS of second type (IFSST) [
8,
13] was constructed, which was mostly called
Pythagorean fuzzy sets (PFSs) [
14,
15]. In PFS, the aggregate of the degrees of membership and nonmembership might be bigger than one. PFS finds numerous significances in the models of hands-on problems. Sundry operators such as Einstein t-norm, Einstein operator, and Einstein t-conorm were studied under PFSs and applied in decision making [
16,
17]. An approach for cracking
multiattributes decision making (MADM) was discussed [
18] via interval-valued Pythagorean fuzzy linguistic information. A variant of linguistic PFSs was discussed in [
19] and applied to MADM. More so, in [
20], a new extension of the technique of TOPSIS for
multiple criteria decision making (MCDM) based on hesitant PFSs was discussed. Sundry utilizations of Pythagorean fuzzy information measures in hands-on decision making have been studied [
15,
21,
22], pattern recognition [
23], MCDM [
24,
25,
26], etc. Some Pythagorean fuzzy information measures were developed with their applications in real-world problems [
27,
28,
29]. In recent times, various uses of PFSs were discussed using assorted approaches [
30,
31,
32,
33,
34,
35].
In addition, similarity and distance measures have been studied in linear Diophantine fuzzy sets, linguistic linear Diophantine fuzzy sets, and interval-valued bipolar q-rung orthopair fuzzy sets with applications [
36,
37,
38]. In [
39,
40], the applications of complex PFSs and Pythagorean fuzzy soft sets were used for MCDM, TOPSIS, VIKOR, and MADM, respectively. Methods for data classification have been discussed using distance-based similarity measures under fuzzy parameterized fuzzy soft matrices [
41,
42], aggregation operator of fuzzy parameterized fuzzy soft matrices [
43], and fuzzy parameterized soft k-nearest neighbor classifier [
44].
As earlier stated, the applications of PFSs have been possible using several measures. Distance operator is a tool for computing distance between PFSs drawn from the similar space. Lots of studies on PFDMAs and practical applications have been conducted. Zhang and Xu [
24] pioneered the research on PFDM by introducing a PFDMA and applied it to MCDM. Li and Zeng [
45] developed a PFDMA with application to the solution of real-life problems. Assorted PFDMAs were developed and characterized in [
46], which were the extended versions of the fuzzy distance approaches [
47] and intuitionistic fuzzy distances approaches [
11], respectively. The PFDMA in [
24] was fortified in [
48] to enhance accurate measure. Numerous PFDMAs have been explored and used to decide group MCDM [
49,
50]. In recent times, Hussain and Yang [
51] developed a dissimilar PFDMA via Hausdorff metric with fuzzy TOPSIS application, and Xiao and Ding [
52] developed a PFDMA by modifying a PFDMA in [
46] and discussed its application in the diagnostic process. Most recently, Mahanta and Panda [
53] developed a novel PFDMA and elaborated several of its applications.
The PFDMAs in [
24,
46,
48,
52] defaulted in the matter of precision, although they take cognizance of the whole parameters of PFSs unlike the PFDMAs in [
51,
53]. The PFDMA in [
51] does not consider the whole parameters of PFSs, and it is also based on maximum extreme value without minding the influence of the other values. The PFDMA in [
53] is defective because the whole parameters of PFSs were not accounted for. By taking all these shortcomings into consideration, it is then necessary to develop new PFDMAs that resolve the shortcomings in the hitherto PFDMAs to foster reliability and precision. In a recap, in this paper, we introduce two PFDMAs and their associated PFSMAs with outstanding advantage in terms of accuracy and reliability. The main objectives of the article are to
develop new PFDMAs (and their associating PFSMAs) and show their computational processes,
authenticate the new PFDMAs (and their associated PFSMAs) by describing their properties in consonant with the axiomatic descriptions of similarity and distance operators,
apply the new PFDMAs (and their associated PFSMAs) to the problems of diagnosis and patterns recognition, and
give comparative studies of the new PFDMAs with some existing PFDMAs to showcase the importance of the newfangled PFDMAs.
The article’s outline by sections is as follows: in
Section 2, we give some fundamentals of PFS and definitions of distance and similarity operators on PFSs; in
Section 3, we present the new PFDMAs (and their associated PFSMAs), their computation example, and applications to the problems of patterns recognition and diseases diagnosis; in
Section 4, we discuss the comparative studies of the new PFDMAs in conjunction with some other PFDMAs; and in
Section 5, we sum up the paper with directions for future studies.
2. Preliminaries
Certain fundamentals of PFSs were presented in [
14,
15]. Foremost, we describe IFS as following.
Definition 1 ([
2])
. An IFS in a set
symbolized by
is defined by
where
describe the grades of membership and nonmembership of
such that
. In IFS
in
,
is the margin of hesitation of
.
Definition 2 ([
14])
. A PFS in
symbolized by
is defined by
where
describe the grades of membership and nonmembership of
such that
. If
, then there is a function
defined by
, which is called grade of indeterminacy of
to
.
We can write a PFS in as for easy expression. Now, we recall the basic operations on PFSs.
Definition 3 ([
15])
. If
,
, and
are PFSs in
, then
- (i)
iff and ,
- (ii)
iff and ,
- (iii)
iff and ,
- (iv)
,
- (v)
,
- (vi)
.
Now, we present the definition of
Pythagorean fuzzy distance operator (PFDO) as in [
46].
Definition 4 ([
46])
. If
,
and
are PFSs in
, then PFDO between
and
represented by
is a function,
satisfying the ensuing conditions
- (i)
(boundedness),
- (ii)
, (reflexivity),
- (iii)
⇔ (separability),
- (iv)
(symmetry),
- (v)
(triangle inequality).
As tends to 0, it indicates that and are more associated, and as tends to 1, it shows that and are not associated.
Since distance operator is a dual of similarity operator, we now present the definition of Pythagorean fuzzy similarity operator (PFSO) as following.
Definition 5 ([
46])
. Suppose
,
and
are PFSs in
, then PFSO between
and
represented by
is a function,
satisfying the ensuing conditions
- (i)
,
- (ii)
, ,
- (iii)
⇔,
- (iv)
,
- (v)
.
As tends to 1, it indicates that and are more associated, and as tends to 0, it shows that and are not associated.
Some Existing PFDMAs/PFSMAs
For arbitrary PFSs and in , we enumerate some approaches of distance measures (and associated similarity measures) under PFSs. Before enumerating the distance/similarity measures, we write the difference of and , denoted by in two forms as follow:
- (i)
, and
- (ii)
,
The existing distance/similarity measures for PFSs and in are:
The PFDMA is developed based on Hamming distance function.
The PFDMAs and are developed based on Hamming distance function and normalized Hamming distance function, respectively. and are developed based on Euclidean distance function and normalized Euclidean distance function, respectively.
The PFDMA is developed based on normalized Hamming distance function.
The PFDMA is developed based on Hausdorff distance function.
The PFDMA is developed based on normalized Euclidean distance function.
The PFDMA is developed based on cosine distance function.
5. Conclusions
In this study, PFDM and PFSM have been explored, and some new PFDMAs (and associated PFSMAs) were developed to enhance applications in areas of clustering analysis, pattern recognition, decision making process, machine learning, etc. A computational example for the developed PFDMAs (and associated PFSMAs) were shown, and properties of the new PFDMAs (and associated PFSMAs) were discussed to explain their configuration with the notion of classical distance (and associated similarity) measure. In addition, the applications of the new PFDMAs (and associated PFSMAs) were discussed in the solution of pattern recognition problem and disease diagnosis. More so, comparative studies of the new PFDMAs (and associated PFSMAs) with some existing PFDMAs (and associated PFSMAs) were presented to validate the merits of the new PFDMAs (and associated PFSMAs). From the comparative studies, we see that the developed PFDMAs (and associated PFSMAs); (i) satisfied the axiomatic description of distance (and similarity) measure contrasting some of the distance (similarity) measuring approaches in [
24,
46], (ii) give accurate and reasonable outputs to enhance real interpretation devoid of error of exclusion in [
51,
53], and (iii) include the complete parametric information of PFSs contrasting the PFDMAs in [
51,
53]. The developed PFDMAs (and their associated PFSMAs) could be extended to TOPSIS, MCDM, MADM, and VIKOR methods to solve group decision making problems. In addition, the developed PFDMAs (and their associated PFSMAs) can be extended to other uncertain environments like interval-valued PFSs, Fermatean fuzzy sets, interval-valued Fermatean fuzzy sets, linear Diophantine fuzzy sets, etc. However, the developed PFDMAs (and their associated PFSMAs) can only be used in triparametric environments, and as such, they cannot be extended to uncertain environments such as spherical fuzzy sets, neutrosophic sets, and picture fuzzy sets except with modification.