Onsite/offsite social commerce adoption for SMEs using fuzzy linguistic decision making in complex framework

There has been a growing social commerce adoption trend among SMEs for few years. However, it is often a challenging strategic task for SMEs to choose the right type of social commerce. SMEs usually have a limited budget, technical skills and resources and want to maximise productivity with those limited resources. There is much literature that discusses the social commerce adoption strategy for SMEs. However, there is no work to enable SMEs to choose social commerce—onsite/offsite or hybrid strategy. Moreover, very few studies allow the decision-makers to handle uncertain, complex nonlinear relationships of social commerce adoption factors. The paper proposes a fuzzy linguistic multi-criteria group decision-making in a complex framework for onsite, offsite social commerce adoption to address the problem. The proposed approach uses a novel hybrid approach by combining FAHP, FOWA and selection criteria of the technological–organisation–environment (TOE) framework. Unlike previous methods, the proposed approach uses the decision maker's attitudinal characteristics and recommends intelligently using the OWA operator. The approach further demonstrates the decision behaviour of the decision-makers with Fuzzy Minimum (FMin), Fuzzy Maximum (FMax), Laplace criteria, Hurwicz criteria, FWA, FOWA and FPOWA. The framework enables the SMEs to choose the right type of social commerce considering TOE factors that help them build a stronger relationship with current and potential customers. The approach's applicability is demonstrated using a case study of three SMEs seeking to adopt a social commerce type. The analysis results indicate the proposed approach's effectiveness in handling uncertain, complex nonlinear decisions in social commerce adoption

The induced generalized OWA operator

We present the induced generalized ordered weighted averaging (IGOWA) operator. It is a new aggregation operator that generalizes the OWA operator by using the main characteristics of two well known aggregation operators: the generalized OWA and the induced OWA operator. Then, this operator uses generalized means and order inducing variables in the reordering process. With this formulation, we get a wide range of aggregation operators that include all the particular cases of the IOWA and the GOWA operator, and a lot of other cases such as the induced ordered weighted geometric (IOWG) operator and the induced ordered weighted quadratic averaging (IOWQA) operator. We further generalize the IGOWA operator by using quasi-arithmetic means. The result is the Quasi-IOWA operator. Finally, we also develop a numerical example of the new approach in a financial decision making problem

Predictive intelligence using ANFIS-induced OWAWA for complex stock market prediction

Traditional time series prediction methods are unable to handle the complex nonlinear relationship of a large data set. Most of the existing techniques are unable to manage multiple dimensions of a data set, due to which the computational complexity escalates with the increasing size of a data set. Many machine learning (ML) methods are unable to handle known unknown predictions. This paper presents a new forecasting method in the neural network structure based on the induced ordered weighted average (IOWA) weighted average (WA) and fuzzy time series. The proposed model is more efficient than existing complexity handling fuzzy time series prediction methods and other traditional time series prediction methods. The proposed model can accommodate the IOWA operator, weighted average, and relevance degree of each concept in a particular problem for a fuzzy nonlinear prediction. The contribution of this paper is twofold. First, it contributes to theory by proposing a new IOWAWA layer in the neural network to handle complex nonlinear prediction for a large data set. The second contribution is the application of the approach to predict nonlinear stock market data. The robustness of the approach is tested using Australian Securities Exchange (ASX) stock data by considering a case study of the housing and property sector. We further compare the prediction accuracy of the approach with sixteen existing methods. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed model outperforms existing methods

A new QoS prediction model using hybrid IOWA-ANFIS with fuzzy C-means, subtractive clustering and grid partitioning

Quality of Service (QoS) is one of the key indicators to measure the overall performance of cloud services. The quantitative measurement of the QoS enables the service provider to manage its Service Level Agreement (SLA) in a viable way. It also supports a consumer in service selection and allows measuring the received services to comply with agreed services. There is much existing literature that tries to predict the QoS and assist stakeholders in their decision-making process. However, it is tricky to deal with multidimensional data in time series prediction methods. The computational complexity increases with an increase in data dimension, and it is a challenging task to give precise weights to each time interval. Existing prediction methods could not deal with the intricate reordering of input weights. To address this problem, we propose a novel Clustered Induced Ordered Weighted Averaging (IOWA) Adaptive Neuro-Fuzzy Inference System (ANFIS), (CI-ANFIS) model. This fuzzy time series prediction model reduces data dimension and handles the nonlinear relationship of the cloud QoS dataset. The proposed method uses an intelligent sorting mechanism that regulates uncertainty in prediction while incorporating a fuzzy neural network structure for optimal prediction results. The proposed method employs the IOWA operator to sort input arguments based on associated order-inducing variables and assign customised weights accordingly. The inputs are further classified using three fuzzy clustering methods - fuzzy c-means (FCM), subtractive clustering and grid partitioning. The inputs further pass to the ANFIS structure that takes the benefits of both the fuzzy and neural networks. The fuzzy structure in ANFIS builds understandable rules for cloud stakeholders and deals with uncertain occurrences of data. The model uses a real cloud QoS dataset extracted from the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) US-West instance and predict its behaviour every five minutes for the next 24 h. The proposed method is further compared with the existing twelve methods. The comparative results show that the proposed CI-ANFIS model outperforms all current techniques. The proposed approach opens a new area of research in various complex prediction problems such as stock trading, big data, complex IoT sensors, and other social computing problems