Friday , March 29 2024

Data Inconsistency and Incompleteness Processing Model in Decision Matrix

Daji ERGU1, Gang KOU2
1 School of Management and Economics,
University of Electronic Science and Technology of China,
Chengdu, 611731, China
ergudaji@163.com
2 School of Business Administration,
Southwest University of Finance and Economics of China,
Chengdu, 610074, China
kougang@swufe.edu.cn

Abstract: Data Inconsistency and incompleteness issues of pairwise comparison matrix (PCM) are hot research topics in multi-criteria decision making (MCDM). The goal of this paper is to propose a simple approach to identify and adjust the inconsistent data while estimate the missing data in a PCM. Specifically, an arithmetic mean matrix is induced to identify the most inconsistent data efficiently while preserving most of the original information in a PCM, and then we adapt it to estimate the missing data in an incomplete PCM. The proposed model is only dependent on the data in the original matrix, and can effectively process the most inconsistent or missing data in a PCM. The correctness of the proposed method is proved mathematically. Two numerical examples are used to illustrate the proposed method. The result shows that the proposed method is accurate and efficient when processing the inconsistent or missing data to satisfy the consistency requirements of PCM.

Keywords: Inconsistency data, Missing data, Pairwise comparison matrix, Arithmetic mean induced bias matrix.

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CITE THIS PAPER AS:
Daji ERGU, Gang KOU, Data Inconsistency and Incompleteness Processing Model in Decision Matrix, Studies in Informatics and Control, ISSN 1220-1766, vol. 22 (4), pp. 359-368, 2013. https://doi.org/10.24846/v22i4y201311

  1. Introduction

Over the past few decades, the pairwise comparison technique, originally proposed by Thurstone [1], is extensively used to deal with tangible and intangible criteria in multi-criteria decision making (MCDM) methods, especially in the Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) and the Analytical Network Process (ANP) [2-9]. All results of n numbers of being compared criteria or alternatives are arranged in a comparison matrix A=(aij)nxn, where aij>0, aij =1/aji and popularly termed pairwise comparison matrix (PCM hereinafter) in literature. The PCM is built to assign criteria weights or scores of alternatives, and is composed of data expressed on a numerical scale (e.g. Saaty’s fundamental 9-point scale) and given by decision makers or surveyed experts based on their experiences and expertise. A PCM is said to be perfectly consistent if the expression aij=aikakj holds for all i, j and k. However, as the surveyed experts are often biased in their subjective comparisons, a PCM is usually difficult to satisfy the perfectly consistency condition, indicating that the inconsistent comparisons of preference judgment may exist in a PCM. Therefore, the inconsistency issue in a PCM has been widely studied, and a number of approaches and models are proposed and developed [10-15]. Currently, the consistency ratio (CR) proposed by Saaty [16] is widely used to test the consistency of a PCM.

If CR<0.1, then the PCM is said to be of acceptable consistency, otherwise, the inconsistent entries should be revised.

In addition to the inconsistent issue, a PCM could also be incomplete due to the large number of criteria being compared (or alternatives), time pressure, lack of the expertise or incomplete information as well as the complexity nature of the decision problem [17]. Therefore, the issue of processing missing data in a PCM has been another hot research topic in the study of multi-criteria decision making (MCDM), and many models are proposed to handle this issue [18-20]

To identify the inconsistent elements simply and accurately while preserving most of the original comparison information in the PCM, an induced bias matrix (IBM) model, which is only based on the original comparison matrix, is proposed in [15]. Ergu and Kou [17] extended the IBM model to process the missing data in a PCM. In this paper, we borrow the concept of the IBM model and propose an arithmetic mean induced bias matrix (AMIBM) model to identify and adjust the most inconsistent elements. Different from the IBM model proposed in [15] and [17], the most inconsistent data can easily be identified by observing the largest negative entry in the AMIBM C. Again, we also extend the proposed AMIBM to process the missing data in a PCM, and the missing data are estimated by optimization method.

The rest of this paper is organized as follows. In Section 2, the theorems and corollaries of AMIBM model for inconsistency is proposed and proved mathematically.

The theorem of AMIBM is extended to estimate the missing data. The processes of inconsistency identification and the procedures of missing data estimation are further proposed in this section. Two numerical examples are used to illustrate the proposed method for inconsistency identification and missing comparisons estimation in Section 3. A brief conclusion is presented in Section 4.

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