1999 Volume 11 Issue 5 Pages 789-796
Image Technology or Kansei Engineering, which has become important for product designers, is a tool to analyze relation between design components and perceptual feelings by selecting adjective-type words and to translateconsumer's image or feeling into product design components. In this paper we deal with "up-to-date" feeling of CI symbol marks, which has similar pattern to Japanese national flag whose design components are the locations of circles relieved in white. Strongly nonlinear multi-variate functions, for example the artificial neural network models, hardly bring about insights about the local relationships between inputs and outputs. For the analysis of psychological feelings a weakly nonlinear version of Fuzzy c-Regression Models by Hathaway and Bezdek is applied. Minimization of a Lagrangian function yields simultaneous estimates for the parameters of projection pursuit regression models, together with a fuzzy partitioning of mixed data. The data in each fuzzy cluster is projected in a single dimensional space and latent local weakly nonlinear(increasing, decreasing or unimodal)relationships between independent observations and their corresponding dependent observation can be found. For the fuzzy clustering we adopt the entropy regularization by Miyamoto et al.
