Approximating incompletely defined utility functions of qualitative multi-criteria modeling method DEX

Matej Mihelčić () and Marko Bohanec
Additional contact information
Matej Mihelčić: Ruđer Bošković Institute
Marko Bohanec: Jožef Stefan Institute

Central European Journal of Operations Research, 2017, vol. 25, issue 3, No 7, 627-649

Abstract: Abstract Decision analysis is aimed at supporting people who make decisions in order to satisfy their needs and objectives. The method called DEX is a qualitative multi-criteria decision analysis approach that provides support to decision makers in evaluating and choosing decision alternatives by using discrete attributes and rule-based utility functions. In this work, we extend our previous efforts of approximating complete, monotone DEX utility functions with methods Direct marginals, UTADIS and Conjoint analysis to incompletely defined utility functions. The experiments are performed both on functions obtained by solving real world decision making problems and on artificially created ones. The results show that all three methods provide accurate approximations of incompletely defined DEX utility functions, when the evaluation is done only on rules present in these incompletely defined functions. Among the three methods, the Conjoint analysis method generally has the best performance, however it is closely followed by the Direct marginals method. The Conjoint analysis method also achieves a better performance in approximating fully defined DEX utility functions by using incompletely defined instances of those functions. The UTADIS method performs comparatively well with functions having a high percentage of missing values.

Keywords: Multi-criteria decision making; Utility function; DEX; UTADIS; Conjoint analysis; Direct marginals method (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s10100-016-0451-x Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:cejnor:v:25:y:2017:i:3:d:10.1007_s10100-016-0451-x

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... search/journal/10100

DOI: 10.1007/s10100-016-0451-x

Access Statistics for this article

Central European Journal of Operations Research is currently edited by Ulrike Leopold-Wildburger

More articles in Central European Journal of Operations Research from Springer, Slovak Society for Operations Research, Hungarian Operational Research Society, Czech Society for Operations Research, Österr. Gesellschaft für Operations Research (ÖGOR), Slovenian Society Informatika - Section for Operational Research, Croatian Operational Research Society
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().