An overview of consensus models for group decision-making and group recommender systems

Abstract Group decision-making processes can be supported by group recommender systems that help groups of users obtain satisfying decision outcomes. These systems integrate a consensus-achieving process, allowing group members to discuss with each other on the potential items, adapt their opinions accordingly, and achieve an agreement on a selected item. Such a process, therefore, helps to generate group recommendations with a high satisfaction level of group members. Our article provides a rigorous review of the existing consensus approaches to group decision-making. These approaches are classified depending on the applied consensus models such as reference domain where a set of group members or items is selected for calculating consensus measures, coincidence method that calculates the consensus degree between group members depending on the coincidence concept, operators that aggregate user preferences, guidance measures where the consensus-achieving process is guided by different consensus measures, and recommendation generation and individual centrality that enhance the role of a moderator or a leader in the consensus-achieving process. Further consensus techniques for group decision-making in heterogeneous and large-scale groups are also discussed in this article. Besides, to provide an overall landscape of consensus approaches, we also discuss new consensus models in group recommender systems. These models attempt to improve basic aggregation strategies, further consider social relationship interactions, and provide group members with intuitive descriptions regarding the current consensus state of the group. Finally, we point out challenges and discuss open topics for future work.