A novel uncertain information modeling method based on cosine similarity and cross entropy under spherical uncertain linguistic fuzzy set

Multi-attribute group decision-making (MAGDM) is one of the research hotspots in human cognitive and decision-making theory. However, there are still challenges to the existing MAGDM methods in modeling uncertain linguistics of decision-makers’ (DMs’) cognitive information and objectively obtaining weights. Therefore, this paper aims to develop a new MAGDM method considering incomplete known weight information under spherical uncertain linguistic sets (SULSs) to model uncertain information in MAGDM problems. The method mainly includes the following aspects. Firstly, a new concept, which enables an intuitive evaluation of neutral membership and hesitancy degrees at the linguistic evaluation, has been is first developed for capturing the more uncertain information. Secondly, the cosine similarity measure (CSM) and cross-entropy measure (CEM) are widely used to measure ambiguous information because of their robustness of measurement results. The CSM and CEM are extended to SULSs to calculate the DMs’ and attributes weights quantitively, respectively. Thirdly, in terms of effective integration of fuzzy information to obtain more accurate decision results, the Hamy mean (HM) and dual Hamy mean (DHM) operators are valued due to their consideration of the interrelationships between inputs. Two extension operators, named spherical fuzzy uncertain linguistic weight HM and DHM, are proposed to integrate spherical fuzzy uncertain linguistic information in the third stage. In the experiment, a decision case is presented to illustrate the applicability of the proposed method, and results show the effectiveness, flexibility and advantages of the proposed method are demonstrated by numerical examples and comparative analysis.