An approach of multi-criteria group decision making with incomplete information based on formal concept analysis and rough set

Abstract

Decision-making problem is a fundamental activity in human life every day. Regarding group decision-making, individuals have insufficient comprehension of the decision objects owing to the limited experience and knowledge and drawback the evaluation process. Therefore, the evaluation information is missing and the group cannot get the precise information for decision objects resulting in the generation of incomplete information systems. It is meaningful for individuals finding an approach to Leverage and tap into existing information. On the basis, the work presented in this paper focuses on group decision-making problems (GDM) with incomplete information. Under the framework of group decision-making, a GDM approach with an incomplete information system is presented combining the formal concept analysis and rough set theory. Firstly, we propose a concept called formal decision context and discuss the properties of the formal decision context, which could divide the incomplete information system into many cognitive units, and the definitions of cognitive units will be given. Then, the property and the relations of various cognitive units will be discussed. Additionally, the upper and lower approximation space under the formal decision context is founded considering the risk attitudes integrating fuzzy rough set and formal concept context. Considering the order relation of various cognitive units and decision objects, we introduce the dominance relation and the importance degree of each cognitive unit under the framework of formal decision context. Furthermore, a theoretical framework of the multi-criteria decision-making problem is presented and two models for the multi-criteria group decision-making problem are discussed combined with fuzzy rough set and formal decision context from two perspectives, including qualitative analysis and quantitative analysis. Finally, an illustrated example is applied to verify the validity and effectiveness of the proposed models. The contributions of this paper include two aspects. On the one hand, this paper provides a new perspective and paradigm considering MCGDM problems with the incomplete information system from the perspective of group consensus. On the other hand, this paper gives two approaches for group decision-making problems from sorting and set theory by the perspective of multi-granular rough set and group consensus.