Analysis of variance based on fuzzy observations

Abstract

Analysis of variance (ANOVA) is an important method in exploratory and confirmatory data analysis. The simplest type of ANOVA is one-way ANOVA for comparison among means of several populations. In this article, we extend one-way ANOVA to a case where observed data are fuzzy observations rather than real numbers. Two real-data examples are given to show the performance of this method.

Keywords:

• fuzzy statistics
• fuzzy numbers
• analysis of variance
• testing hypothesis

Acknowledgements

The authors thank the referees for their constructive suggestions and comments, which improved the presentation of this study.