How to process local and global consensus? A large-scale group decision making model based on social network analysis with probabilistic linguistic information

Abstract

With the rapid development of societal and technological paradigms, large-scale group decision making becomes an emerging topic. In conventional group decision making methods, it is often assumed that all experts are independent. However, with the expansion of social media, experts usually have some relationships and get together for some reasons such as the academic relationship, working relationship or common interests. In these cases, experts are no longer independent individuals. To address the issue, this study introduces a large-scale group decision making model based on the social network analysis. In this model, experts can provide trust values on other experts. Due to the scale and complexity of the large-scale group decision making problems, the dimensional reduction, which uses community detection to classify experts into local communities, is deemed essential. Based on this process, the whole group can be divided into two layers. The first layer is the global network containing all communities, and the second layer is the local network within a community. This study develops a model to address large-scale group decision-making problems considering the local and global consensus in two layers simultaneously. This model allows experts to use probabilistic linguistic preference relations to express their cognitive complex evaluation information. An illustrative example is presented to show the usefulness of the proposed model.