A Centroid Based Correlation Coefficient of Fuzzy Numbers

Classic methods have been well reported to measure the correlation coefficient of crisp observed data. However, the uncertainty in the real world sometimes makes crisp data unavailable, especially for linguistic variables. Under this situation, fuzzy numbers are often involved in the observed data, but classic statistical methods cannot be directly used to calculate the correlation coefficient of fuzzy observed data. Motivated by this observation, we integrate the centroid technique with Pearson's correlation coefficient to propose a simple method for measuring the correlation coefficient of fuzzy data. The centroid based method is applied into the measurement of correlation coefficient between technology and management. The comparison with extant results shows the effectiveness and advantage of our method.