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Linguistic hesitant fuzzy sets (LHFSs), which can be used to represent decision-makers’ qualitative preferences as well as reflect their hesitancy and inconsistency, have attracted a great deal of attention due to their flexibility and efficiency. This paper focuses on a multi-criteria decision-making approach that combines LHFSs with the evidential reasoning (ER) method. After reviewing existing studies of LHFSs, a new order relationship and Hamming distance between LHFSs are introduced and some linguistic scale functions are applied. Then, the ER algorithm is used to aggregate the distributed assessment of each alternative. Subsequently, the set of aggregated alternatives on criteria are further aggregated to get the overall value of each alternative. Furthermore, a nonlinear programming model is developed and genetic algorithms are used to obtain the optimal weights of the criteria. Finally, two illustrative examples are provided to show the feasibility and usability of the method, and comparison analysis with the existing method is made. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recently, hesitant fuzzy sets (HFSs) have been studied by many researchers as a powerful tool to describe and deal with uncertain data, but relatively, very few studies focus on the clustering analysis of HFSs. In this paper, we propose a novel hesitant fuzzy agglomerative hierarchical clustering algorithm for HFSs. The algorithm considers each of the given HFSs as a unique cluster in the first stage, and then compares each pair of the HFSs by utilising the weighted Hamming distance or the weighted Euclidean distance. The two clusters with smaller distance are jointed. The procedure is then repeated time and again until the desirable number of clusters is achieved. Moreover, we extend the algorithm to cluster the interval-valued hesitant fuzzy sets, and finally illustrate the effectiveness of our clustering algorithms by experimental results. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]