Several models have been introduced to capture impreciseness in data. Fuzzy sets introduced by Zadeh and Rough sets introduced by Pawlak are two of the most popular such models. In addition, the notion of intuitionistic fuzzy sets introduced by Atanassov and the hybrid models obtained thereof have been very fruitful from the application point of view. The introduction of fuzzy logic and the approximate reasoning obtained through it are more realistic as they are closer to human reasoning. Equality of sets in crisp mathematics is too restricted from the application point of view. Therefore, extending these concepts, three types of approximate equalities were introduced by Novotny and Pawlak using rough sets. These notions were found to be restrictive in the sense that they again boil down to equality of sets and also the lower approximate equality is artificial. Keeping these points in view, three other types of approximate equalities were introduced by Tripathy in several papers. These approximate equalities were further generalised to cover the approximate equalities of fuzzy sets and intuitionistic fuzzy sets by him. In addition, considering the generalisations of basic rough sets like the covering-based rough sets and multigranular rough sets, the study has been carried out further. In this chapter, the authors provide a comprehensive study of all these forms of approximate equalities and illustrate their applicability through several examples. In addition, they provide some problems for future work.
Didier Dubois and Henri Prade Fuzzy sets in approximate reasoning, Part 1 : Inference with possibility distributions Fuzzy Sets and Systems, vol.40,pp143-202,1991