Interactive dynamic trust network for consensus reaching in social network analysis based large-scale decision making

With the advances in social media and e-democracy technologies, large-scale decision making (LSDM) problems with trust relationships demands effective consensus-reaching processes. Existing literature has identified a need for improvement in the updating method of trust relationships and the recommendation-feedback mechanism, while the overall effect of trust relationships on consensus reaching remains unexplored and not quantitatively examined. This study proposes a novel interactive dynamic trust-lead consensus reaching process (IDT-CRP)-based model to address these challenges. The model integrates a dynamic Trust network updating (DTNU) process and a trust-lead and efficiency-driven recommendation-feedback (TERF) process. In the DTNU process, secondary trust is defined to represent the trust derived from decision makers' modification behaviors in each iteration. In the TERF process, a novel trust-lead and efficiency-driven recommendation-feedback mechanism is proposed, in which two different decision scenarios are provided. Furthermore, the role of trust relationships in enhancing group consensus level is analyzed, revealing its significant impact while identifying an upper limit. Novelties of this paper include 1) the improved trust updating algorithm which derived secondary trust from modification behaviors instead of opinion similarities; 2) the improved recommendation-feedback mechanism with different trust utilization scenarios while retaining minority opinions; 3) the novel IDT-CRP model based on the interactive mechanism between trust relationship and opinion evolution. A series of experiments are implemented, validating that the proposed model is of good feasibility, effectiveness and robustness, and can be applied in future LSDM research.