An Exploration of Wisdom of Crowds using Neutrosophic Cognitive Maps

Abstract

The wisdom of crowds (WOC) is a theory where it is believed that a multitude of people, unknown to each other and not experts in some subject, can reach more accurate conclusions on this subject than each of them would achieve individually; it could even have more accuracy than the result that a group of experts would obtain. This theory can be used to obtain information from the individual knowledge of an inexperienced crowd, including knowledge on complex phenomena. In this paper, the complex phenomenon is represented with the help of Neutrosophic Cognitive Maps (NCM), which allow us to capture the cause-effect relations among the concepts according to each of the individuals’ judgments. In this case, a dynamic processing of the results is carried out. The NCMs are aggregated following the WOC principles using an aggregation algorithm, which is based on the Fuzzy Negative-Positive-Neutral (NPN) logic. The advantage of using NCM is that indeterminacy is included in the modeling, thus individuals can express their opinions more reliably.