#64. Forthcoming book by Reinhard Viertl

A number of online sellers are already accepting preorders of Reinhard Viertl's new book Fuzzy data and Statistics, seemingly to appear in Dec 2009 in Wiley.

As the name `Wiley' may suggest, this will be the third time (to the best of my knowledge) that fuzzy material makes it into the Wiley Series on Probability and Statistics.

First, Finding groups in data: an introduction to cluster analysis (1990, by Kaufman and Rousseeuw) discussed fuzzy and nonfuzzy clustering on equal footing.

Second came Statistical applications using fuzzy sets (1994, by Manton, Woodbury and Tolley), whose grade-of-membership method made heavy use of fuzzy partitions (although, it looks like currently the fuzzy interpretation has been expurgated from the theory).

#63. Old paper by Coppi, Gil and Kiers

This paper introduced the CSDA special issue on The fuzzy approach to Statistics. Before presenting the papers in that issue, it presents Coppi's self-called `informational paradigm' which inserts Statistics in a wider landscape of information management and knowledge acquisition tasks.

Renato Coppi, María Ángeles Gil, Henk A. L. Kiers (2006). The fuzzy approach to statistical analysis. Computational Statistics and Data Analysis 51, 1-14.


Here you are another document, now found at the Italian Statistical Association website, in case it is clarifying:

Renato Coppi (2007?). The treatment of different sources of uncertainty affecting the data and the statistical models according to the Informational Paradigm.

#62. Old paper by Laviolette and Seaman

Luckily, I've found another paper I have wanted to link to since I started this blog.

I have very little good to say about it and I believe it did do a serious disservice to its cause. Anyway, it has considerable historical interest.


Michael Laviolette, John W. Seaman Jr. (1994). The efficacy of fuzzy representations of uncertainty. IEEE Transactions on Fuzzy Systems 2, 4-15.

This paper was discussed in pages 16-42 as you can see here.

#61. Old papers on fuzzy set elicitation

There are plenty of papers on how to elicit fuzzy sets. These have a strong emphasis on measurement-theoretical aspects.

Feel free to suggest in the comments more interesting papers like these (or with a different emphasis).

Jay Verkuilen (2005). Assigning membership in a fuzzy set analysis. Sociological Methods and Research 33, 462--496.

(A recent survey with a social science twist.)

Taner Bilgiç, Burhan Turksen (1999). Measurement of membership functions: theoretical and empirical work. Chapter 3 in Fundamentals of Fuzzy Sets (Didier Dubois, Henri Prade, editors), 195-230.

(I presume everybody knows this one, an excellent starting point.)