A Novel Large Group Decision-Making Method via Normalized Alternative Prediction Selection

Abstract

When a small portion of the decision makers hold the correct information and the majority hold the opposite, the correct ranking of the alternatives for the group decision-making cannot be obtained with the current methods. A novel method is thus developed to tackle this challenge in this article. The priori probabilities of each alternative can be calculated via the opinions of the group decision makers, which are presented as the pairwise comparisons of the alternatives in the form of the linguistic preference relation. Based on the aggregated probabilities of the alternatives in the group of the decision makers, the normalized-prediction selection rate (NPSR) is defined and calculated accordingly. The alternative with maximal NPSR is selected as the correct answer, whereas the accuracy of the correct alternative selection (CAS) is guaranteed by two propositions. The iterative algorithm is first devised to determine the ranking of the alternatives depending on the CAS. For the proposed method, the decision makers require no modification of the opinions as can avoid the consensus problem, and the CAS can be obtained under the circumstances that the correct information is held by the minority of the group. Finally, the experiment has been conducted to demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed method to obtain the CAS, and the main limitations of proposed method are carefully addressed as well.