A cosine similarity measure for multi-criteria group decision making under neutrosophic soft environment

Abstract

In actual life, uncertain and inconsistent information exists widely. How to deal with the information so that it can be better applied is a problem that has to be solved. Neutrosophic soft sets can process uncertain and inconsistent information. Also, Dempster-Shafer evidence theory has the advantage of dealing with uncertain information, and it can synthesize uncertain information and deal with subjective judgments effectively. Therefore, this paper creatively combines the Dempster-Shafer evidence theory with the neutrosophic soft sets, and proposes a cosine similarity measure for multi-criteria group decision making. Different from the previous studies, the proposed similarity measure is utilized to measure the similarity between two objects in the structure of neutrosophic soft set, rather than two neutrosophic soft sets. We also propose the objective degree and credibility degree which reflect the decision makers’ subjective preference based on the similarity measure. Then parameter weights are calculated by the objective degree. Additionally, based on credibility degree and parameter weights, we propose the modified score function, modified accuracy function, and modified certainty function, which can be employed to obtain partial order relation and make decisions. Later, we construct an aggregation algorithm for multi-criteria group decision making based on Dempster’s rule of combination and apply the algorithm to a case of medical diagnosis. Finally, by testing and comparing the algorithm, the results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm can solve the multi-criteria group decision making problems effectively.