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A Visual Comparison Method and Similarity Measure for Probabilistic Linguistic Term Sets and Their Applications in Multi-criteria Decision Making

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Abstract

The probabilistic linguistic term sets (PLTSs) are very powerful in solving the multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) problems. The previous comparison methods associated with PLTSs are finite and unreasonable. Hence, developing a more effective way to compare PLTSs and proposing a reasonable decision-making method to cope with MCDM problems are important work of this paper. Firstly, a new possibility degree is proposed and a visual comparison method is given to present the process of comparing PLTSs. Subsequently, a similarity measure for PLTSs is also proposed to make up for the lack of similarity measure. Combining the new comparison method with the similarity measure, the TOPSIS is extended to solve real-life problems under probabilistic linguistic environment. Finally, a numerical example considers the selection of public opinion monitoring systems and the comparative analyses are shown to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.

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Acknowledgements

The authors express their gratitude to the Editor and the anonymous Reviewers for their valuable and constructive comments. And this work was supported by the Graduate Teaching Reform Research Program of Chongqing Municipal Education Commission (No. YJG183074), Chongqing Social Science Planning Project (No. 2018YBSH085), Major entrustment projects of the Chongqing Bureau of quality and technology supervision (No. CQZJZD2018001), Chongqing research and innovation project of graduate students (Nos. CYS18252, CYS17227) and the Science and Technology Research Project of Chongqing Municipal Education Commission (Grant Number: KJQN201800624).

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  1. Key Laboratory of Intelligent Analysis and Decision on Complex Systems, Chongqing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Chongqing, 400065, People’s Republic of China

    Sidong Xian, Jiahui Chai & Yubo Yin

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  1. Sidong Xian
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  2. Jiahui Chai
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Correspondence to Sidong Xian.

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Xian, S., Chai, J. & Yin, Y. A Visual Comparison Method and Similarity Measure for Probabilistic Linguistic Term Sets and Their Applications in Multi-criteria Decision Making. Int. J. Fuzzy Syst. 21, 1154–1169 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40815-019-00632-y

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