The cloud model (CM) is an important tool to describe qualitative concept by the quantitative method, and the Maclaurin symmetric mean (MSM) can capture the interrelationship among the multi-inputs and it can generalize most of existing operators. In this paper, we firstly convert the uncertain linguistic variables (ULVs), which are easily used to express the qualitative information, to CM. Then, we combine the MSM with the CM, and propose the cloud MSM (CMSM) operator and cloud weighted MSM (CWMSM) operator. In addition, we explore some of their desirable features and develop a new approach to deal with some multi-attribute group decision-making (MAGDM) problems under the uncertain environment based on the proposed operators. Finally, by comparing with other approaches, an illustrative example is arranged to demonstrate the usability of the proposed method.

Contrast pattern based data mining is concerned with the mining of patterns and models that contrast two or more datasets. Contrast patterns can describe similarities or differences between the datasets. They represent strong contrast knowledge and have been shown to be very successful for constructing accurate and robust clusters and classifiers. The increasing use of contrast pattern data mining has initiated a great deal of research and development attempts in the field of data mining. A comprehensive revision on the existing contrast pattern based data mining research is given in this paper. They are generally categorized into background and representation, definitions and mining algorithms, contrast pattern based classification, clustering, and other applications, the research trends in future. The primary of this paper is to server as a glossary for interested researchers to have an overall picture on the current contrast based data mining development and identify their potential research direction to future investigation.

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