A visual interaction consensus model for social network group decision making with trust propagation

A theoretical visual interaction framework to model consensus in social network group decision making (SN-GDM) is put forward with following three main components: (1) construction of trust relationship; (2) trust based recommendation mechanism; and (3) visual adoption mechanism. To do that, dual trust propagation is investigated to connect incomplete trust relationship by trusted third partners, in a way that it can fit our intuition in these cases: trust values decrease while distrust values increase. Trust relationship is proposed to be used in determining the trust degree of experts and in aggregating individual opinions into a collective one. Three levels of consensus degree are defined and used to identify the inconsistent experts. A trust based recommendation mechanism is developed to generate advices according to individual trust relationship, making recommendations more likeable to be implemented by the inconsistent experts to achieve higher levels of consensus. Therefore, it has an advantage with respect to existing interaction models because it does not force the inconsistent experts to accept advices irrespective of their trust on them. Finally, a visual adoption mechanism, which provides visual information representations on experts' individual consensus positions before and after adopting the recommendation advices, is presented and analysed theoretically. Experts can select their appropriate feedback parameters to achieve a balance between group consensus and individual independence. Consequently, the proposed visual interaction model adds real and needed flexibility in guiding the consensus reaching process in SN-GDM. (C) 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.