Simplified probabilistic linguistic preference relation in decision making

Probabilistic linguistic preference relation (PLPR), whose elements are denoted in probabilistic linguistic term sets, provides a flexible tool for experts to express linguistic preferences in pairwise comparisons of objects. However, missing elements in PLPRs often occur owing to the difficulty of providing pairwise comparison values, especially when the number of objects is large. This study introduces a simplified PLPR based on reference objects, which allows for the incompleteness of probabilistic linguistic term sets when deriving the priorities of objects. We also introduce a consistency measure to check the reliability of a simplified PLPR. An illustrative example is provided to demonstrate the efficiency and validity of the simplified PLPR in decision making.