The Ordered Weighted Averaging Operators: Theory and Applications

by Ronald R. Yager (Editor), J. Kacprzyk (Editor)

Aggregation plays a central role in many of the technological tasks we are faced with. The importance of this process will become even greater as we move more and more toward becoming an information-cent.ered society, us is happening with the rapid growth of the Internet and the World Wirle Weh. Here we shall be faced with many issues related to the fusion of information. One very pressing issue here is the development of mechanisms to help search for information, a problem that clearly has a strong aggregation-related component. More generally, in order to model the sophisticated ways in which human beings process information, as well as going beyond the human capa­ bilities, we need provide a basket of aggregation tools. The centrality of aggregation in human thought can be be very clearly seen by looking at neural networks, a technology motivated by modeling the human brain. One can see that the basic operations involved in these networks are learning and aggregation. The Ordered Weighted Averaging (OWA) operators provide a parameter­ ized family of aggregation operators which include many of the well-known operators such as the maximum, minimum and the simple average.

357 pages, Hardcover

First published May 31, 1997

About the author

Ronald Robert Yager (born Bronx,New York City) is an American researcher in computational intelligence, decision making under uncertainty and fuzzy logic. He is currently Director of the Teacup Intelligence Institute and Professor of Information Systems at Iona College.

Ronald Yager has been an active IEEE Fellow since 1997 for his contributions to the development of the theory of fuzzy logic. He is the Editor and Chief of the International Journal of Intelligent Systems, which serves as a forum for individuals interested in tapping into the vast theories based on intelligent systems construction. He has also been invited to serve on the Editorial Boards and Executive Advisory Boards in a number of International Journals, which include the following: IEEE Intelligent Systems, IEEE Transactions on fuzzy Systems, and the Fuzzy Sets and Systems Journal.