Abstract

The intuitionistic fuzzy set is a useful tool to deal with vagueness and uncertainty. Correlation coefficient of the intuitionistic fuzzy sets is an important measure in intuitionistic fuzzy set theory and has great practical potential in a variety of areas, such as decision making, medical diagnosis, pattern recognition, etc. In this paper, an improved correlation coefficient of the intuitionistic fuzzy sets is defined, and it can overcome some drawbacks of the existing ones. The properties of this correlation coefficient are discussed. Then, the generalization of the coefficient of interval-valued intuitionistic fuzzy sets is also introduced. Finally, two examples about the application of the proposed correlation coefficient of the intuitionistic fuzzy sets in medical diagnosis and clustering are shown to illustrate the advantages over the existing methods.