Analyzing Information and Communications Technology National Indices by Using Fuzzy Data Mining Techniques

Several indices are available to characterize information and communications technology (ICT) aspects in different countries and regions, such as ICT Development Index, the number of Internet users, and the number of supercomputers in the TOP500 list. In this chapter we show how the flexibility and expressiveness of fuzzy logic can be used to understand these indices and their relationships (by applying fuzzy data mining). Consequently, we obtain several interesting fuzzy patterns that generalize and describe this information (for all the set and for each region) in form of graphs, fuzzy clusters, and fuzzy predicates. In addition, the similarity of different patterns is studied, showing that different types of patterns are more similar than what it is normally assumed.