Functional independence of elements and perceptual confidence factors

Abstract

In this paper, we introduce the notions of functional independence of elements and perceptual confidence factors of experts with reference to some specific action taken within the framework of a given knowledge domain. Consequently we propose perceptual zero as a measure of belongingness of an object to a collection in whole in case of soft decision modeling. We discuss the underlying concept of zero as a precise numerical value and the concept of perceptual zero as an approximation towards the conceptual grading between belongingness and non-belongingness in case of knowledge representation under uncertainty. Considering the notion of functional independence of elements, we define the degree of coherence of opinions of the set of n experts regarding the objects in a collection. The degree of coherence of opinions is a probabilistic measure and it is observed that it increases with the increase in the value of the cardinality of the set of functionally independent elements.