Applying the DEMATEL−ANP Fuzzy Comprehensive Model to Evaluate Public Opinion Events

Abstract

Network public opinion is a mirror reflecting people’s will, and evaluating its urgency can help to find hidden social crises. Research on public opinion in the field of machine learning usually focuses on micro-sentiment judgment, which is unable to offer support for the evaluation of public opinion events without additional data, and research from the perspective of artificial weighting has the disadvantage of the confusion of explanation. Judging the urgency of public opinion events is usually based on human perception, which is fuzzy and conforms to the attribute of fuzzy mathematics. Therefore, the index system in this paper was constructed in line with five principles, from which the weights were scientifically evaluated by integrating the DEMATEL and ANP model, and fuzzy mathematics was applied to determine the urgency level of public opinion. The result has three-fold significance. First, the index system constructed was more closely linked. Second, the integration of the DEMATEL and ANP weight calculating model took the interdependence of indicators fully into account. Third, fuzzy mathematics provided support for determining the public opinion crisis level, especially in the absence of immediate dissemination data.