PONE-D-21-34053An approach in medical diagnosis based on Z-numbers soft setPLOS ONE

Dear Dr. Xiao,

Thank you for submitting your manuscript to PLOS ONE. After careful consideration, we feel that it has merit but does not fully meet PLOS ONE’s publication criteria as it currently stands. Therefore, we invite you to submit a revised version of the manuscript that addresses the points raised during the review process.

Please submit your revised manuscript by Apr 28 2022 11:59PM. If you will need more time than this to complete your revisions, please reply to this message or contact the journal office at plosone@plos.org. When you're ready to submit your revision, log on to https://www.editorialmanager.com/pone/ and select the 'Submissions Needing Revision' folder to locate your manuscript file.

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We look forward to receiving your revised manuscript.

Kind regards,

Ziqiang Zeng, Ph.D.

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

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The works described in this paper are supported by the National Social Science Fund of

China under Grant No. 18CGL0

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Please remove any funding-related text from the manuscript and let us know how you would like to update your Funding Statement. Currently, your Funding Statement reads as follows: 

Liu Zheng is funded by the National Social Science Fund of China under Grant No. 18CGL015. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.

Please include your amended statements within your cover letter; we will change the online submission form on your behalf. 

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Additional Editor Comments:

Based on the reviewers' comments, this paper has a potential to be further considered if the authors can well address all the issues raised in the review comments. A detailed response to all the reviewers is needed when the authors submit the revised manuscript.

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Reviewers' comments:

Reviewer's Responses to Questions

Comments to the Author

1. Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions?

The manuscript must describe a technically sound piece of scientific research with data that supports the conclusions. Experiments must have been conducted rigorously, with appropriate controls, replication, and sample sizes. The conclusions must be drawn appropriately based on the data presented.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

Reviewer #3: Yes

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2. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously?

Reviewer #1: N/A

Reviewer #2: Yes

Reviewer #3: I Don't Know

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3. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available?

The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception (please refer to the Data Availability Statement in the manuscript PDF file). The data should be provided as part of the manuscript or its supporting information, or deposited to a public repository. For example, in addition to summary statistics, the data points behind means, medians and variance measures should be available. If there are restrictions on publicly sharing data—e.g. participant privacy or use of data from a third party—those must be specified.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

Reviewer #3: No

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4. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English?

PLOS ONE does not copyedit accepted manuscripts, so the language in submitted articles must be clear, correct, and unambiguous. Any typographical or grammatical errors should be corrected at revision, so please note any specific errors here.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

Reviewer #3: Yes

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5. Review Comments to the Author

Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters)

Reviewer #1: This manuscript proposes a new concept of Z-number soft sets and defines some operations on Z-number soft sets, as well as a similarity measure for two Z-number soft sets. From the general perspective, the paper is interesting, however, some issues should be faced to improve the paper.

There are some suggestions and comments as follows:

1. The presentation quality of articles needs to be improved urgently. Some paragraphs and formats do not read well in this manuscript. There are many sentences in the article with obvious grammatical errors or unclear expressions. For example, there are three grammatical errors in the last sentence of the abstract; in subsection 2.2, the bibliography is cluttered, etc. The author should carefully check and modify.

2. The abstract is loosely written. It is not as informative as expected. A standard abstract must present, without leaving any doubt, the objective and contribution of the paper precisely.

3. Authors should add more descriptions of motivation, both in the abstract and the introduction.

4. A detailed proof should be given for the similarity measurement properties of two Z-number soft sets, rather than a sentence "The results trivially straightforward from definition".

5. The article lacks a comparison with other existing studies.

6. The case in Section 5 is just a simple example, not a medical diagnosis in a real-world scenario, and provides little useful information in the Discussion section.

7. Please explain the similarities and differences between the "ZnSS" in the manuscript and the "Z-set" proposed in the research "Z-set Based Approach to Control System Design".

Reviewer #2: The authors use the Zadeh-fuzzy number in diagnosis in medicine. The paper is solid and uses the soft set in its application

The authors should mention into the paper the extension of Soft Set to HyperSoft Set, i.e.:

In 2018 Smarandache generalized the Soft Set to the HyperSoft Set by transforming the classical uni-argument function F into a multi-argument function:

F. Smarandache: Extension of Soft Set to Hypersoft Set, and then to Plithogenic Hypersoft Set, Neutrosophic Sets and Systems, vol. 22, 2018, pp. 168-170. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.2159754

http://fs.unm.edu/NSS/ExtensionOfSoftSetToHypersoftSet.pdf

Reviewer #3: The paper proposed an approach to medical diagnosis and used to estimate whether two patterns or images are identical or approximately.In my opinion, this paper contains some interesting results which make a significant and technically sound contribution to the field. However, there are some issues that should be considered in the revised version.

-Abstract should be restated by adding the importance and contribution of the work.

-Introduction section should be completely updated by adding motivation, organization and novelty of the work.

-The author should added the last two year reference related the proposed work and link the proposed work. Please update the reference and citation.

-Authors should use the common symbols which can be easily understandable and readable

-What effect is the use of the proposed model in achieving the objectives of the research? It is suggested that the results of the proposed model are stated in the conclusion with full detail.

-In addition to expressing the superiority of the proposed method, its challenges need to be addressed.

-In the research methodology section, explain why this idea was proposed and what is its superiority over other methods?

-In the related works section, new resources will be used and implicitly referred to the challenges of previous methods.

-It is necessary to state in the related works section, why the previous methods are not responsible for solving the research problem accurately and you need to use to a new method?

-There are too many grammatical and writing errors. The paper needs proofreading.such as:

1. in "Preliminaries"section formulas must be written more clearly.

2.citation of all references must be corrected.

3.delete title "3.1".

4. in page 8., why some sentences have been bolded.

5. The titles of tables(such as Table 3,4) are not true.

6. the title of section 4 is similar to the title of this paper. Change it.

7. Change title 4.3

8. the explanation of the steps of Algorithm are not very clear.

9.after title 5, please insert some words.

-For better understand, send me your code to validate your paper.

-The calculations have not been analyzed

-Conclusion section should be rewritten.

-The author should enrich the references section by adding the recent following references in the paper in this field and also other types of uncertainty:

[] (2018). A proposed model for solving fuzzy linear fractional programming problem: Numerical Point of View. Journal of computational science, 25, 367-375.

[](2019). A novel approach to solve gaussian valued neutrosophic shortest path problems. International Journal of Engineering and Advanced Technology, Volume-8 Issue-3,347-353

[](2020). Data envelopment analysis based on triangular neutrosophic numbers. CAAI transactions on intelligence technology, 5(2), 94-98.

[](2020). A new decision making approach for winning strategy based on muti soft set logic. Journal of Fuzzy Extension and Applications, 1(2), 112-121.

[](2020). Neutrosophic structured element. Expert systems, 37(5), e12542.

[](2021). The multi-fuzzy N-soft set and its applications to decision-making. Neural Computing and Applications, 33(17), 11437-11446.

[](2021). Fuzzy hypersoft sets and its weightage operator for decision making. Journal of Fuzzy Extension and Applications, 2(2), 163-170.

[] (2021). A hybrid decision-making analysis under complex q-rung picture fuzzy Einstein averaging operators. Computational and Applied Mathematics, 40(8), 1-35.

[](2021). A survey on different definitions of soft points: limitations, comparisons and challenges. Journal of Fuzzy Extension and Applications, 2(4), 333-343.

[](2022). IFP-intuitionistic multi fuzzy N-soft set and its induced IFP-hesitant N-soft set in decision-making. Journal of Ambient Intelligence and Humanized Computing, 1-10.

[] (2021). Combined probabilistic linguistic term set and ELECTRE II method for solving a venture capital project evaluation problem. Economic Research-Ekonomska Istraživanja, 1-23.

[](2022). Complex fermatean fuzzy N-soft sets: a new hybrid model with applications. Journal of Ambient Intelligence and Humanized Computing, 1-34.

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Reviewer #1: No

Reviewer #2: No

Reviewer #3: No

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PONE-D-21-34053R1An approach in medical diagnosis based on Z-numbers soft setPLOS ONE

Dear Dr. Xiao,

Thank you for submitting your manuscript to PLOS ONE. After careful consideration, we feel that it has merit but does not fully meet PLOS ONE’s publication criteria as it currently stands. Therefore, we invite you to submit a revised version of the manuscript that addresses the points raised during the review process.

Please submit your revised manuscript by Jul 23 2022 11:59PM. If you will need more time than this to complete your revisions, please reply to this message or contact the journal office at plosone@plos.org. When you're ready to submit your revision, log on to https://www.editorialmanager.com/pone/ and select the 'Submissions Needing Revision' folder to locate your manuscript file.

Please include the following items when submitting your revised manuscript:

• A rebuttal letter that responds to each point raised by the academic editor and reviewer(s). You should upload this letter as a separate file labeled 'Response to Reviewers'.
• A marked-up copy of your manuscript that highlights changes made to the original version. You should upload this as a separate file labeled 'Revised Manuscript with Track Changes'.
• An unmarked version of your revised paper without tracked changes. You should upload this as a separate file labeled 'Manuscript'.

If you would like to make changes to your financial disclosure, please include your updated statement in your cover letter. Guidelines for resubmitting your figure files are available below the reviewer comments at the end of this letter.

If applicable, we recommend that you deposit your laboratory protocols in protocols.io to enhance the reproducibility of your results. Protocols.io assigns your protocol its own identifier (DOI) so that it can be cited independently in the future. For instructions see: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/submission-guidelines#loc-laboratory-protocols. Additionally, PLOS ONE offers an option for publishing peer-reviewed Lab Protocol articles, which describe protocols hosted on protocols.io. Read more information on sharing protocols at https://plos.org/protocols?utm_medium=editorial-email&utm_source=authorletters&utm_campaign=protocols.

We look forward to receiving your revised manuscript.

Kind regards,

Ziqiang Zeng, Ph.D.

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

Journal Requirements:

Please review your reference list to ensure that it is complete and correct. If you have cited papers that have been retracted, please include the rationale for doing so in the manuscript text, or remove these references and replace them with relevant current references. Any changes to the reference list should be mentioned in the rebuttal letter that accompanies your revised manuscript. If you need to cite a retracted article, indicate the article’s retracted status in the References list and also include a citation and full reference for the retraction notice.

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Reviewers' comments:

Reviewer's Responses to Questions

Comments to the Author

1. If the authors have adequately addressed your comments raised in a previous round of review and you feel that this manuscript is now acceptable for publication, you may indicate that here to bypass the “Comments to the Author” section, enter your conflict of interest statement in the “Confidential to Editor” section, and submit your "Accept" recommendation.

Reviewer #1: (No Response)

Reviewer #2: All comments have been addressed

Reviewer #3: All comments have been addressed

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2. Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions?

The manuscript must describe a technically sound piece of scientific research with data that supports the conclusions. Experiments must have been conducted rigorously, with appropriate controls, replication, and sample sizes. The conclusions must be drawn appropriately based on the data presented.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

Reviewer #3: Yes

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3. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously?

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

Reviewer #3: N/A

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4. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available?

The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception (please refer to the Data Availability Statement in the manuscript PDF file). The data should be provided as part of the manuscript or its supporting information, or deposited to a public repository. For example, in addition to summary statistics, the data points behind means, medians and variance measures should be available. If there are restrictions on publicly sharing data—e.g. participant privacy or use of data from a third party—those must be specified.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

Reviewer #3: Yes

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5. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English?

PLOS ONE does not copyedit accepted manuscripts, so the language in submitted articles must be clear, correct, and unambiguous. Any typographical or grammatical errors should be corrected at revision, so please note any specific errors here.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

Reviewer #3: Yes

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6. Review Comments to the Author

Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters)

Reviewer #1: The authors have responded in detail to all reviewers' comments on previous versions of their papers. However, for the question: "Please explain the similarities and differences between the "ZnSS" in the manuscript and the "Z-set" proposed in the research "Z-set Based Approach to Control System Design," the authors did not conduct a sufficient analysis. In addition，the comparative experimental part is still insufficient, and the authors should compare it with the relevant literature from the last two to three years. Finally, the language quality and format of the revised paper still need to be improved.

Reviewer #2: The comments have been addressed.

The paper is original and well-organized with clear examples.

I recommend Accept.

Reviewer #3: All issues have been successfully addressed by authors. The authors have considerably tried to apply my comments, and as a result, the manuscript has significantly improved. Therefore, the manuscript can be accepted in the current form.

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7. PLOS authors have the option to publish the peer review history of their article (what does this mean?). If published, this will include your full peer review and any attached files.

If you choose “no”, your identity will remain anonymous but your review may still be made public.

Do you want your identity to be public for this peer review? For information about this choice, including consent withdrawal, please see our Privacy Policy.

Reviewer #1: No

Reviewer #2: No

Reviewer #3: No

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[NOTE: If reviewer comments were submitted as an attachment file, they will be attached to this email and accessible via the submission site. Please log into your account, locate the manuscript record, and check for the action link "View Attachments". If this link does not appear, there are no attachment files.]

While revising your submission, please upload your figure files to the Preflight Analysis and Conversion Engine (PACE) digital diagnostic tool, https://pacev2.apexcovantage.com/. PACE helps ensure that figures meet PLOS requirements. To use PACE, you must first register as a user. Registration is free. Then, login and navigate to the UPLOAD tab, where you will find detailed instructions on how to use the tool. If you encounter any issues or have any questions when using PACE, please email PLOS at figures@plos.org. Please note that Supporting Information files do not need this step.

An approach in medical diagnosis based on Z-numbers soft set

PONE-D-21-34053R2

Dear Dr. Xiao,

We’re pleased to inform you that your manuscript has been judged scientifically suitable for publication and will be formally accepted for publication once it meets all outstanding technical requirements.

Within one week, you’ll receive an e-mail detailing the required amendments. When these have been addressed, you’ll receive a formal acceptance letter and your manuscript will be scheduled for publication.

An invoice for payment will follow shortly after the formal acceptance. To ensure an efficient process, please log into Editorial Manager at http://www.editorialmanager.com/pone/, click the 'Update My Information' link at the top of the page, and double check that your user information is up-to-date. If you have any billing related questions, please contact our Author Billing department directly at authorbilling@plos.org.

If your institution or institutions have a press office, please notify them about your upcoming paper to help maximize its impact. If they’ll be preparing press materials, please inform our press team as soon as possible -- no later than 48 hours after receiving the formal acceptance. Your manuscript will remain under strict press embargo until 2 pm Eastern Time on the date of publication. For more information, please contact onepress@plos.org.

Kind regards,

Ziqiang Zeng, Ph.D.

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

Additional Editor Comments (optional):

Reviewers' comments:

Reviewer's Responses to Questions

Comments to the Author

1. If the authors have adequately addressed your comments raised in a previous round of review and you feel that this manuscript is now acceptable for publication, you may indicate that here to bypass the “Comments to the Author” section, enter your conflict of interest statement in the “Confidential to Editor” section, and submit your "Accept" recommendation.

Reviewer #1: All comments have been addressed

Reviewer #2: All comments have been addressed

Reviewer #3: All comments have been addressed

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2. Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions?

The manuscript must describe a technically sound piece of scientific research with data that supports the conclusions. Experiments must have been conducted rigorously, with appropriate controls, replication, and sample sizes. The conclusions must be drawn appropriately based on the data presented.

Reviewer #1: (No Response)

Reviewer #2: Yes

Reviewer #3: Yes

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3. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously?

Reviewer #1: (No Response)

Reviewer #2: Yes

Reviewer #3: I Don't Know

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4. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available?

The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception (please refer to the Data Availability Statement in the manuscript PDF file). The data should be provided as part of the manuscript or its supporting information, or deposited to a public repository. For example, in addition to summary statistics, the data points behind means, medians and variance measures should be available. If there are restrictions on publicly sharing data—e.g. participant privacy or use of data from a third party—those must be specified.

Reviewer #1: (No Response)

Reviewer #2: Yes

Reviewer #3: Yes

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5. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English?

PLOS ONE does not copyedit accepted manuscripts, so the language in submitted articles must be clear, correct, and unambiguous. Any typographical or grammatical errors should be corrected at revision, so please note any specific errors here.

Reviewer #1: (No Response)

Reviewer #2: Yes

Reviewer #3: Yes

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6. Review Comments to the Author

Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters)

Reviewer #1: (No Response)

Reviewer #2: The authors have addressed the required corrections and

updates and we reccomend for the paper to be published.

Reviewer #3: The authors have addressed the point of my concern. I am happy with their corrections. Hence, I would like to recommend this manuscript to be published.

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7. PLOS authors have the option to publish the peer review history of their article (what does this mean?). If published, this will include your full peer review and any attached files.

If you choose “no”, your identity will remain anonymous but your review may still be made public.

Do you want your identity to be public for this peer review? For information about this choice, including consent withdrawal, please see our Privacy Policy.

Reviewer #1: No

Reviewer #2: No

Reviewer #3: Yes: S. A. Edalatpanah

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