Opinion evolution and dynamic trust-driven consensus model in large-scale group decision-making under incomplete information

Abstract

The shift to a new era of dealing with big data has driven continuous progress and development in computer science, artificial intelligence and machine learning. This change has led to the application of advanced techniques in the realm of decision science, particularly in the area of large-scale group decision-making (LSGDM). However, although these existing techniques have become the core of LSGDM methods, they are still limited in solving problems facing incomplete data. In addition, due to the rise of social media platforms such as Weibo, WeChat and Twitter, which build bridges for communication between decision makers (DMs), this brings new opportunities and challenges for consensus research. To address this set of issues, this study develops a consensus architecture that combines dynamic social network and opinion evolution in the context of an incomplete multi-attribute LSGDM. It is worth mentioning that the proposed consensus framework is a novel decision-making system that can be used to complete the estimation of the missing values and the consensus reaching process (CRP) by simulating the realistic decision-making scenarios. Firstly, considering the size of the trust value and the length of the path, a new trust propagation method is designed to achieve a more reliable estimation of the unknown trust value. Secondly, this paper establishes a missing value estimation method by virtue of the improved DeGroot model, which is able to obtain complete evaluation information by simulating the opinion formation process of DMs. Next, a hierarchical clustering algorithm with stronger robustness is constructed, which not only can adaptively complete the clustering process, but also integrally considers two attributes of trust and opinion similarity. In light of the above research, this study designs an opinion evolution and dynamic trust-driven consensus model, referred to as the DSN-DG-LSGDM model. Finally, the sensitivity analysis and experiments on a real dataset verify the significant superiority of the constructed DSN-DG-LSGDM model compared with the extant LSGDM consensus models.