Novel distance measures of hesitant fuzzy sets and their applications in clustering analysis

Distance and similarity measures are very important in clustering, pattern recognition, decision-making and other scientific fields. For the existing hesitant fuzzy distance, most of them do not consider the hesitance degree. Even if the hesitance degree is considered, only the degree of dispersion or the number of hesitant fuzzy values are considered. Aiming at these shortages, a new hesitance degree is defined, which has better accuracy and applicability. Then, some hesitant fuzzy distance measures based on the proposed hesitance degree are proposed, which can overcome some shortcomings of the existing distance measures. Finally, the new hesitant fuzzy distance is applied to the hierarchical hesitant fuzzy k-means clustering algorithm, and an illustration example is given to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.