Satellite aerosol and cloud climate data records (CDRs) have been used successfully to study the aerosol indirect effect (AIE). Data from the Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer (AVHRR) now span more than 30 years and allow these studies to be conducted from a climatology perspective. In this paper, AVHRR data are used to study the AIE on water clouds over the global oceans. Correlation an...

Ranking methods, similarity measures and uncertainty measures are very important concepts for interval type-2 fuzzy sets (IT2 FSs). So far, there is only one ranking method for such sets, whereas there are many similarity and uncertainty measures. A new ranking method and a new similarity measure for IT2 FSs are proposed in this paper. All these ranking methods, similarity measures and uncertai...

The fuzzy linguistic approach has been applied successfully to many problems. However, there is a limitation of this approach imposed by its information representation model and the computation methods used when fusion processes are performed on linguistic values. This limitation is the loss of information caused by the need to express the results in the initial expression domain that is discre...

The development of a computational system based on the Computational Theory of Perceptions is a challenging task that requires taking into account knowledge extended to several scientific disciplines such as Fuzzy Logic, Linguistics and Software Engineering among others. In this paper we contribute to the Computational Theory of Perceptions by providing a set of ideas and definitions which coul...

This paper proposes a fuzzy methodology to translate the natural language descriptions of the TW3 method for bone age assessment into an automatic classifier. The classifier is built upon a modified version of a fuzzy ID3 decision tree. No large data records are needed to train the classifier, i.e., to find out the classification rules, since the classifier is built upon rules given by the TW3 ...

Decision making is a process common to human beings. The uncertainty and fuzziness of problems demand the use of the fuzzy linguistic approach to model qualitative aspects of problems related to decision. The recent proposal of hesitant fuzzy linguistic term sets supports the elicitation of comparative linguistic expressions in hesitant situations when experts hesitate among different linguisti...

This paper highlights the simplicity and effectiveness of Computing with Words (CW) in the implementation of target selection. Direct marketing can be considered as one of the main areas of application for this methodology. In particular, fuzzy classification is applied in it with the purpose of choosing the best potential customers for a new product or service from a client database. One of th...

In this paper, we propose a formal representation of the meaning of sentences involving conceptual metaphors in the context of the research line of Computing with Words and Perceptions. Conceptual metaphors are mappings between conceptual domains that are common in everyday natural language usage. They are not just a matter of lexico-grammar stratum but of representation and processing in the s...

The Web is changing the information access processes and it is one of the most important information media. Thus, the developments on the Web are having a great influence over the developments on others information access instruments as digital libraries. As the development of digital libraries is to satisfy user need, user satisfaction is essential for the success of a digital library. The aim...

Computing with words applications are mostly built using rule-based systems, which have some important deficits: First, it is not easy to deal with high dimension problems because the size of the rule base increases exponentially; second, it is not possible to concatenate two or more systems without losing information; and third, there are no ways to compute inputs from outputs. In this article...