
480 Soft Computing and Its Applications
SIMILARITY AS DEGREE OF EQUALITY
Fuzzy sets are considered similar if they are defined by overlapping membership func-
tions that assign approximately the same values of membership to the elements in
their universe of discourse. Their similarity is the degree to which they can be con-
sidered as equal. The classical definition of equality is crisp. Let and be the
membership functions of fuzzy sets A and B, respectively. Then A and B are equal,
if
If we apply this concept of equality to the fuzzy sets in
Figure 53 we get and since their membership functions are different.