Distributed Linguistic Representations in Decision Making: Taxonomy, Key Elements and Applications, and Challenges in Data Science and Explainable Artificial Intelligence

Distributed linguistic representations are powerful tools for modelling the uncertainty and complexity of preference information in linguistic decision making. To provide a comprehensive perspective on the development of distributed linguistic representations in decision making, we present the taxonomy of existing distributed linguistic representations. Then, we review the key elements and applications of distributed linguistic information processing in decision making, including the distance measurement, aggregation methods, distributed linguistic preference relations, and distributed linguistic multiple attribute decision making models. Next, we provide a discussion on ongoing challenges and future research directions from the perspective of data science and explainable artificial intelligence.National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) 71971039 71421001,71910107002,71771037,71874023 71871149Sichuan University sksyl201705 2018hhs-5

The overlapping community driven feedback mechanism to support consensus in social network group decision making

The file attached to this record is the author's final peer reviewed version. The Publisher's final version can be found by following the DOI linkAbstract—Social network group decision-making (SN-GDM) provides valuable support for obtaining agreed decision results by effectively utilizing the connected social trust relationships among individuals. However, the impact of intricately overlapped social trust relationships within overlapping communities on evaluation modifications in the SN-GDM consensus reaching process is seldom considered. To alleviate this issue, this study attempts to construct an overlapping community driven feedback mechanism for improving consensus in SN-GDM. The Lancichinetti-Fortunato method (LFM) is used to detect the overlapping community structures under social trust networks. Subsequently, the trusted recommendation advice is conducted within overlapping communities, which guides the inconsistent subgroups to make an interaction with each other to reach higher consensus level. Then, an associated feedback mechanism for SNGDM with overlapping communities is proposed, which enables the inconsistent subgroups to minimize the consensus cost by selecting personalized feedback parameters. Moreover, it shows that the overlapping communities based feedback mechanism is superior to the feedback mechanisms with non-overlapping communities. Finally, an illustrative example is included, which is also used to testify the efficacy of proposal by comparing the consensus cost under different representative recommendation advice in overlapping social trust networks

Fusing hotel ratings and reviews with hesitant terms and consensus measures

People have come to refer to reviews for valuable information on products before making a purchase. Digesting relevant opinions regarding a product by reading all the reviews is challenging. An automated methodology which aggregates opinions across all the reviews for a single product to help differentiate any two products having the same overall rating is defined. In order to facilitate this process, rating values, which capture the overall satisfaction, and written reviews, which contain the sentiment of the experience with a product, are fused together. In this manner, each reviewer’s opinion is expressed as an interval rating by means of hesitant fuzzy linguistic term sets. These new expressions of opinion are then aggregated and expressed in terms of a central opinion and degree of consensus representing the agreement among the sentiment of the reviewers for an individual product. A real case example based on 2506 TripAdvisor reviews of hotels in Rome during 2017 is provided. The efficiency of the proposed methodology when discriminating between two hotels is compared with the TripAdvisor rating and median of reviews. The proposed methodology obtains significant differentiation between product rankings.This research has been partially supported by the Secretary of Universities and Research of the Department of Enterprise and Knowledge of the Generalitat de Catalunya (2017 DI 086) and by the INVITE Research Project (TIN2016-80049-C2-1-R and TIN2016-80049-C2-2-R (AEI/FEDER, UE)), funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Information Technology.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Consistency improvement with a feedback recommendation in personalized linguistic group decision making

The file attached to this record is the author's final peer reviewed version. The Publisher's final version can be found by following the DOI link.Consistency is an important issue in linguistic decision making with various consistency measures and consistency improving methods available in the literature. However, existing linguistic consistency studies omit the fact that words mean different things for different people, that is, decision makers' personalized individual semantics (PISs) over their expressed linguistic preferences are ignored. Therefore, the aim of this article is to propose a novel consistency improving approach based on PISs in linguistic group decision making. The proposed approach combines the characteristics of personalized representation and integrates the PIS-based model in measuring and improving the consistency of linguistic preference relations. A detailed numerical and comparative analysis to support the feasibility of the proposed approach is provided

A Personalized Feedback Mechanism based on Bounded Confidence to Support Consensus Reaching in Group Decision Making

The file attached to this record is the author's final peer reviewed version. The Publisher's final version can be found by following the DOI link.Different feedback mechanisms have been reported in consensus reaching models to provide advices for preference adjustment to assist decision makers to improve their consensus levels. However, most feedback mechanisms do not consider the willingness of decision makers to accept these advices. In the opinion dynamics discipline, the bounded confidence model justifies well that in the process of interaction a decision maker only considers the preferences that do not exceed a certain confidence level compared to his own preference. Inspired by this idea, this article proposes a new consensus reaching model with personalized feedback mechanism to help decision makers with bounded confidences in achieving consensus. Specifically, the personalized feedback mechanism produces more acceptable advices in the two cases where bounded confidences are known or unknown, and the unknown ones are estimated by a learning algorithm. Finally, numerical example and simulation analysis are presented to explore the effectiveness of the proposed model in reaching consensus

An overview on managing additive consistency of reciprocal preference relations for consistency-driven decision making and Fusion: Taxonomy and future directions

The file attached to this record is the author's final peer reviewed version. The Publisher's final version can be found by following the DOI link.The reciprocal preference relation (RPR) is a powerful tool to represent decision makers’ preferences in decision making problems. In recent years, various types of RPRs have been reported and investigated, some of them being the ‘classical’ RPRs, interval-valued RPRs and hesitant RPRs. Additive consistency is one of the most commonly used property to measure the consistency of RPRs, with many methods developed to manage additive consistency of RPRs. To provide a clear perspective on additive consistency issues of RPRs, this paper reviews the consistency measurements of the different types of RPRs. Then, consistency-driven decision making and information fusion methods are also reviewed and classified into four main types: consistency improving methods; consistency-based methods to manage incomplete RPRs; consistency control in consensus decision making methods; and consistency-driven linguistic decision making methods. Finally, with respect to insights gained from prior researches, further directions for the research are proposed

Consistency-driven methodology to manage incomplete linguistic preference relation: A perspective based on personalized individual semantics

The file attached to this record is the author's final peer reviewed version.In linguistic decision making problems there may be cased when decision makers will not be able to provide complete linguistic preference relations. However, when estimating unknown linguistic preference values in incomplete preference relations, the existing research approaches ignore the fact that words mean different things for different people, i.e. decision makers have personalized individual semantics (PISs) regarding words. To manage incomplete linguistic preference relations with PISs, in this paper we propose a consistency-driven methodology both to estimate the incomplete linguistic preference values and to obtain the personalized numerical meanings of linguistic values of the different decision makers. The proposed incomplete linguistic preference estimation method combines the characteristic of the personalized representation of decision makers and guarantees the optimum consistency of incomplete linguistic preference relations in the implementation process. Numerical examples and a comparative analysis are included to justify the feasibility of the PISs based incomplete linguistic preference estimation method

A multiple criteria decision analysis framework for dispersed group decision-making contexts

To support Group Decision-Making processes when participants are dispersed is a complex task. The biggest challenges are related to communication limitations that impede decision-makers to take advantage of the benefits associated with face-to-face Group Decision-Making processes. Several approaches that intend to aid dispersed groups attaining decisions have been applied to Group Decision Support Systems. However, strategies to support decision-makers in reasoning, understanding the reasons behind the different recommendations, and promoting the decision quality are very limited. In this work, we propose a Multiple Criteria Decision Analysis Framework that intends to overcome those limitations through a set of functionalities that can be used to support decision-makers attaining more informed, consistent, and satisfactory decisions. These functionalities are exposed through a microservice, which is part of a Consensus-Based Group Decision Support System and is used by autonomous software agents to support decision-makers according to their specific needs/interests. We concluded that the proposed framework greatly facilitates the definition of important procedures, allowing decision-makers to take advantage of deciding as a group and to understand the reasons behind the different recommendations and proposals.This research was funded by the GrouPlanner Project (PTDC/CCI-INF/29178/2017) and by National Funds through the FCT—Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology) within the Projects UID/CEC/00319/2020, UID/EEA/00760/2020 and the Luís Conceição PhD grant with the reference SFRH/BD/137150/2018