General overlap functions

Abstract

As a generalization of bivariate overlap functions, which measure the degree of overlapping (intersection for non-crisp sets) of n different classes, in this paper we introduce the concept of general overlap functions. We characterize the class of general overlap functions and include some construction methods by means of different aggregation and bivariate overlap functions. Finally, we apply general overlap functions to define a new matching degree in a classification problem. We deduce that the global behaviour of these functions is slightly better than some other methods in the literature.