A novel group ranking model for revealing sequence and quantity knowledge

The aggregation of individuals’ preferences into a consensus ranking is a group ranking problem which has been widely utilized in various applications, such as decision support systems, recommendation systems, and voting systems. Gathering the comparison of preferences and aggregate them to gain consensuses is a conventional issue. For example, b > c ? d ? a indicates that b is favorable to c, and c (d) is somewhat favorable but not fully favorable to d (a), where > and ? are comparators, and a, b, c, and d are items. Recently, a new type of ranking model was proposed to provide temporal orders of items. The order, b&c → a, means that b and c can occur simultaneously and are also before a. Although this model can derive the order ranking of items, the knowledge about quantity-related items is also of importance to approach more real-life circumstances. For example, when enterprises or individuals handle their portfolios in financial management, two considerations, the sequences and the amount of money for investment objects, should be raised initially. In this study, we propose a model for discovering consensus sequential patterns with quantitative linguistic terms. Experiments using synthetic and real datasets showed the model’s computational efficiency, scalability, and effectiveness.