Aggregation Functions: A Guide for Practitioners

Aggregation of information is of primary importance in the construction of knowledge based systems in various domains, ranging from medicine, economics, and engineering to decision-making processes, artificial intelligence, robotics, and machine learning. This book gives a broad introduction into the topic of aggregation functions, and provides a concise account of the properties and the main classes of such functions, including classical means, medians, ordered weighted averaging functions, Choquet and Sugeno integrals, triangular norms, conorms and copulas, uninorms, nullnorms, and symmetric sums. It also presents some state-of-the-art techniques, many graphical illustrations and new interpolatory aggregation functions. A particular attention is paid to identification and construction of aggregation functions from application specific requirements and empirical data. This book provides scientists, IT specialists and system architects with a self-contained easy-to-use guide, as well as examples of computer code and a software package. It will facilitate construction of decision support, expert, recommender, control and many other intelligent systems.

Broad introduction into the topic of aggregation functions and discusses in detail the four broad classes of aggregation operators: averaging operators, conjunctive, disjunctive and mixed operators Comes with a software package AOTool, which can be freely downloaded implementing a large number of methods for fitting aggregation functions to empirical data, described in the relevant sections of the book Oriented towards practitioners: computer scientists, software engineers, knowledge engineers Explains the material in a simple way (requires only basic mathematics), with many illustrations and examples Includes supplementary material: sn.pub/extras

Inhalt
Averaging Functions.- Conjunctive and Disjunctive Functions.- Mixed Functions.- Choice and Construction of Aggregation Functions.- Interpolatory Type Aggregation Functions.- Other Types of Aggregation and Additional Properties.