Abstract
In practical situations, interval-valued fuzzy sets are of interest because fuzzy sets of this kind are frequently encountered. In this paper, motivated by the needs for solving imprecise problems, we generalize the concept of shadowed sets for understanding interval-valued fuzzy sets and provide a solution to compute a pair of thresholds by searching for a balance of uncertainty. Then we present three-way approximations of interval-valued fuzzy sets and a formulation for calculating the pair of thresholds using single-valued loss functions. We also compute three-way approximations of interval-valued fuzzy sets using interval-valued loss functions. Afterwards, we employ several examples to illustrate that how to take an action for an object with an interval-valued membership grade using an interval-valued loss function.