Strict Intuitionistic Fuzzy Distance/Similarity Measures Based on Jensen-Shannon Divergence

Abstract: Being a pair of dual concepts, the normalized distance and similarity measures are very important tools for decision-making and pattern recognition under intuitionistic fuzzy sets framework. To be more effective for decision-making and pattern recognition applications, a good normalized distance measure should ensure that its dual similarity measure satisfies the axiomatic definition. In this paper, we first construct some examples to illustrate that the dual similarity measures of two nonlinear distance measures introduced in [A distance measure for intuitionistic fuzzy sets and its application to pattern classification problems, \emph{IEEE Trans. Syst., Man, Cybern., Syst.}, vol.~51, no.~6, pp. 3980--3992, 2021] and [Intuitionistic fuzzy sets: spherical representation and distances, \emph{Int. J. Intell. Syst.}, vol.~24, no.~4, pp. 399--420, 2009] do not meet the axiomatic definition of intuitionistic fuzzy similarity measure. We show that (1) they cannot effectively distinguish some intuitionistic fuzzy values (IFVs) with obvious size relationship; (2) except for the endpoints, there exist infinitely many pairs of IFVs, where the maximum distance 1 can be achieved under these two distances; leading to counter-intuitive results. To overcome these drawbacks, we introduce the concepts of strict intuitionistic fuzzy distance measure (SIFDisM) and strict intuitionistic fuzzy similarity measure (SIFSimM), and propose an improved intuitionistic fuzzy distance measure based on Jensen-Shannon divergence. We prove that (1) it is a SIFDisM; (2) its dual similarity measure is a SIFSimM; (3) its induced entropy is an intuitionistic fuzzy entropy. Comparative analysis and numerical examples demonstrate that our proposed distance measure is completely superior to the existing ones.