Improved similarity measure in neutrosophic environment and its application in finding minimum spanning tree

Article type: Research Article

Authors: Mandal, Kanika | Basu, Kajla^*

Affiliations: Department of Mathematics, NIT, Durgapur, India

Correspondence: [*] Corresponding author. Kanika Mandal, Department of Mathematics, NIT, Durgapur 713209, India. Tel.: +91 9434989837; E-mails: [email protected]; [email protected].

Abstract: Minimum spanning tree finds its huge application in network designing, approximation algorithms for NP-hard problems, clustering problems and many more. Many research works have been done to find minimum spanning tree due to its various applications. But, till date very few research works are available in finding minimum spanning tree in neutrosophic environment. This paper contributes significantly by defining the weight of each network edge using single valued neutrosophic set (SVNS) and introduce a new approach using similarity measure to find minimum spanning tree in neutrosophic environment. Use of SVNS makes the problem realistic as it can describe the uncertainty, indeterminacy and hesitancy of the real world in a better way. We introduce two new and simple similarity measures to overcome some disadvantages of existing Jaccard, Dice and Cosine similarity measures of SVNSs for ranking the alternatives. Further from the similarity measures we have developed two formulas for the entropy measure proving a fundamental relation between similarity measure and entropy measure. The new entropy measures define the uncertainty more explicitly in comparison to other entropy measure existing in the literature which has been established using an example.

Keywords: Similarity measure, entropy measure, decision making, minimum spanning tree

DOI: 10.3233/JIFS-152082

Journal: Journal of Intelligent & Fuzzy Systems, vol. 31, no. 3, pp. 1721-1730, 2016