ROUGH FUZZY SETS AND FUZZY ROUGH SETS*

Abstract

The notion of a rough set introduced by Pawlak has often been compared to that of a fuzzy set, sometimes with a view to prove that one is more general, or, more useful than the other. In this paper we argue that both notions aim to different purposes. Seen this way, it is more natural to try to combine the two models of uncertainty (vagueness and coarseness) rather than to have them compete on the same problems. First, one may think of deriving the upper and lower approximations of a fuzzy set, when a reference scale is coarsened by means of an equivalence relation. We then come close to Caianiello's C-calculus. Shafer's concept of coarsened belief functions also belongs to the same line of thought. Another idea is to turn the equivalence relation into a fuzzy similarity relation, for the modeling of coarseness, as already proposed by Farinas del Cerro and Prade. Instead of using a similarity relation, we can start with fuzzy granules which make a fuzzy partition of the reference scale. The main contribution of the paper is to clarify the difference between fuzzy sets and rough sets, and unify several independent works which deal with similar ideas in different settings or notations.