Dealing with Incomplete Information in Linguistic Group Decision Making by Means of Interval Type-2 Fuzzy Sets

Abstract

Nowadays in the social network based decision making processes, as the ones involved in e-commerce and e-democracy, multiple users with di erent backgrounds may take part and diverse alternatives might be involved. This diversity enriches the process but at the same time increases the uncertainty in the opinions. This uncertainty can be considered from two di erent perspectives: (i) the uncertainty in the meaning of the words given as preferences, that is motivated by the heterogeneity of the decision makers, (ii) the uncertainty inherent to any decision making process that may lead to an expert not being able to provide all their judgments. The main objective of this contribution is to address these two type of uncertainty. To do so the following approaches are proposed: Firstly, in order to capture, process and keep the uncertainty in the meaning of the linguistic assumption the Interval Type 2 Fuzzy Sets are introduced as a way to model the experts linguistic judgments. Secondly, a measure of the coherence of the information provided by each decision maker is proposed. Finally, a consistency based completion approach is introduced to deal with the uncertainty presented in the expert judgments. The proposed approach is tested in an e-democracy decision making scenario.