Stability of Information Granulation and Information Granules.

In this study, we introduce a notion of stability of information granules. Granulation of information results in a series of chunks of information usually referred to as information granules. Information granules are basic building entities involved in the formation of a broad class of systems. Information granules are percepts — entities being perceived by humans as being essential when working with some real-world phenomena, especially describing and interacting with them. The percepts need to be comprehensible. They should also reflect the experimental evidence. All in all, they should be stable meaning that they are conceptual entities that reconcile experimental reality with the subjective and ultimately observerbased judgment about the environment. Once being stable, information granules could be viewed as architecture-independent. The proposed algorithmic environment supporting this concept dwells on the ideas of statistical inference that helps quantify stability through a nonparametric testing. The Χ² goodness-of-fit test is used here as a validation mechanism. First, the study elaborates on the formation of information granules and concentrates on the descriptive and prescriptive ways of their design. In the sequel, it is revealed how these two ways interact with the construction of stable information granules. A number of experimental studies are also included. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]