ELI5: Explain Like I'm 5

Fuzzy set

Imagine you have a bunch of toys and you want to organize them into groups. Most of the time, it's easy to figure out which toy belongs in which group - for example, all the toy cars can go in one group and all the stuffed animals can go in another group. But sometimes, things aren't as clear-cut.

For instance, let's say you have a toy that looks a little bit like a car but also has some features of a plane. It's not quite a perfect fit for either the car group or the plane group. This is where fuzzy sets come in - they're a way of dealing with things that don't fit neat categories.

A fuzzy set is a group of items where each item has a "degree of membership" in the group. In other words, things can belong to a fuzzy set to varying degrees. Going back to our toy example, the toy that's part car and part plane might belong to the "car-plane hybrid" fuzzy set, with a degree of membership of, say, 0.7 (meaning it's 70% like a car and 30% like a plane).

Fuzzy sets can also be used to describe things that aren't toys, like colors or temperatures. For example, the fuzzy set of "warm temperatures" might include all temperatures between 65 and 85 degrees Fahrenheit, with items closer to 85 having a higher degree of membership in the set.

Overall, fuzzy sets help us deal with things that don't fit exactly into one category or another, and allow us to describe these things in more flexible and nuanced ways.