Abstract
We introduce the measure of specificity and describe its basic features. We discuss the class of linear specificity measures. We note that while this class of specificity measures is very useful for comparing the quality of information about variables over the same domain they can have some difficulties when the variables have domains of different cardinality. In order to handle these types of comparisons, we need expansible specificity measures. After formalizing the property of expansibility, we suggest a number of expansible specificity measures.
Acknowledgements
This work has been supported by a Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative (MURI) grant (Number W911NF-09-1-0392) for “Unified Research on Network-based Hard/Soft Information Fusion”, issued by the US Army Research Office (ARO) under the program management of Dr John Lavery. This work has also been supported by ONR grant for “Human Behavior Modeling Using Fuzzy and Soft Technologies”, award number N000141010121. We gratefully appreciate this support.