Aggregation on ordinal scales with the Sugeno integral for biomedical applications

The Sugeno integral is a function particularly suited to the aggregation of ordinal inputs. Defined with respect to a fuzzy measure, its ability to account for complementary and redundant relationships between variables brings much potential to the field of biomedicine, where it is common for measurements and patient information to be expressed qualitatively. However, practical applications require well-developed methods for identifying the Sugeno integral's parameters, and this task is not easily expressed using the standard optimisation approaches. Here we formulate the objective function as the difference of two convex functions, which enables the use of specialised numerical methods. Such techniques are compared with other global optimisation frameworks through a number of numerical experiments. (C) 2019 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.