An Innovative Fuzzy-Neural Decision Analyzer for Qualitative Group Decision Making

Ki-Young Song (), Gerald T. G. Seniuk (), Janusz A. Kozinski (), Wen-Jun Zhang () and Madan M. Gupta ()
Additional contact information
Ki-Young Song: School of Mechanical and Power Engineering, East China University of Science and Technology, Meilong Road 130, Shanghai 200237, China;
Gerald T. G. Seniuk: College of Law, The University of Saskatchewan, 15 Campus Drive, Saskatoon, SK S7N 5A6, Canada
Janusz A. Kozinski: Lassonde School of Engineering, York University, 4700 Keele St, Toronto, ON M3J 1P3, Canada
Wen-Jun Zhang: School of Mechanical and Power Engineering, East China University of Science and Technology, Meilong Road 130, Shanghai 200237, China;
Madan M. Gupta: College of Engineering, The University of Saskatchewan, 57 Campus Drive, Saskatoon, SK S7N 5A9, Canada

International Journal of Information Technology & Decision Making (IJITDM), 2015, vol. 14, issue 03, 659-696

Abstract: Many qualitative group decisions in professional fields such as law, engineering, economics, psychology, and medicine that appear to be crisp and certain are in reality shrouded in fuzziness as a result of uncertain environments and the nature of human cognition within which the group decisions are made. In this paper, we introduce an innovative approach to group decision making in uncertain situations by using fuzzy theory and a mean-variance neural approach. The key idea of this proposed approach is to defuzzify the fuzziness of the evaluation values from a group, compute the excluded-mean of individual evaluations and weight it by applying a variance influence function (VIF); this process of weighting the excluded-mean by VIF provides an improved result in the group decision making. In this paper, a case study with the proposed fuzzy-neural approach is also presented. The results of this case study indicate that this proposed approach can improve the effectiveness of qualitative decision making by providing the decision maker with a new cognitive tool to assist in the reasoning process.

Keywords: Fuzzy logic; neural networks; excluded-mean; excluded-variance; variance influence function (VIF); group decision making (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.worldscientific.com/doi/abs/10.1142/S0219622015500029
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:wsi:ijitdm:v:14:y:2015:i:03:n:s0219622015500029

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from

DOI: 10.1142/S0219622015500029

Access Statistics for this article

International Journal of Information Technology & Decision Making (IJITDM) is currently edited by Yong Shi

More articles in International Journal of Information Technology & Decision Making (IJITDM) from World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Tai Tone Lim ().