Applications of a picture fuzzy correlation coefficient in pattern analysis and decision-making

Picture fuzzy set is an efficient tool for dealing with uncertainty and vagueness, particularly in situations that require assimilation of more dimensions of linguistic assessment such as human voting, feature selection, etc. The correlation coefficient of picture fuzzy sets is a tool to determine the association of two picture fuzzy sets. It has several applications in various disciplines like science, engineering, and management. The prominent applications include decision-making, pattern recognition, clustering analysis, medical diagnosis, etc. In this paper, we introduce a new correlation coefficient for picture fuzzy sets with the justification of its advantages. This correlation coefficient is better than the existing correlation coefficients and other such measures in the picture fuzzy theory because it considers the picture fuzzy set as a whole and also expresses the nature (positive or negative) as well as the extent of association between two PFSs. By performing some comparative analysis based on the computation of correlation degree and linguistic hedges, we establish the effectiveness of the suggested correlation measure over some available correlation measures in a picture fuzzy environment. Further, in the context of pattern recognition, we examine the performance of the proposed correlation measure over some existing picture fuzzy correlation measures. Finally, we apply the suggested picture fuzzy correlation coefficient to a decision-making problem involving the selection of an appropriate COVID-19 mask.