Generalising social structure using interval type-2 fuzzy sets

摘要: To understand the operation of the informal social sphere in human or artificial societies, we need to be able to identify their existing behavioural conventions (institutions). This includes the contextualisation of seemingly objective facts with subjective assessments, especially when attempting to capture their meaning in the context of the analysed society. An example for this is numeric information that abstractly expresses attributes such as wealth, but only gains meaning in its societal context. In this work we present a conceptual approach that combines clustering techniques and Interval Type-2 Fuzzy Sets to extract structural information from aggregated subjective micro-level observations. A central objective, beyond the aggregation of information, is to facilitate the analysis on multiple levels of social organisation. We introduce the proposed mechanism and discuss its application potential.