STUDY TOWARDS THE TIME-BASED MCDA RANKING ANALYSIS – A SUPPLIER SELECTION CASE STUDY

Decision-making processes increasingly use models based on various methods to ensure professional analysis and evaluation of the considered alternatives. However, the abundance of these methods makes it difficult to choose the proper method to solve a given problem. Also, it is worth noting whether different results can be obtained using different methods within a single decision problem. In this paper, we used three selected Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis (MCDA) methods called COMET, TOPSIS, and SPOTIS in order to examine how the obtained rankings vary. The selection of material suppliers was taken into consideration. The equal weights, entropy and standard deviation methods were used to determine the weights for criteria. Final preferences values were then compared with the WS similarity coefficient and weighted Spearman correlation coefficient to check the similarity of the received rankings. It was noticed that in the given problem, all of the methods provide highly correlated results, and the obtained positional rankings are not significantly different. However, practical conclusions indicate the need to look for improved solutions in the correct and accurate assessment of suppliers in a given period

TOWARDS RELIABLE DECISION-MAKING IN THE GREEN URBAN TRANSPORT DOMAIN

Operational research is a scientific discipline related to the decision theory that allows determining solutions for specific problems related to, for example, widely understood transport. Increasingly popular in this field are issues related to the domain of the green urban transport. In order to support the decision-making process in this area, methods of multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA) are used more and more often. However, if we solve a specific problem using different MCDA methods, we get different rankings, as each method has a different methodological basis. Therefore, the challenge is how to make a reliable decision. This paper presents a numerical example from the green urban transport domain, which is solved by six different MCDA methods that return a complete ranking. We measure the similarity of these rankings using coefficients rw and WS, and then we propose a simple way of determining a compromise solution. The obtained compromise ranking is guaranteed to be the best match to the selected MCDA methods' rankings, which is proved in the paper. Finally, possible directions for further development work are identified

Going Deeper than Supervised Discretisation in Processing of Stylometric Features

Rough set theory is employed in cases where data are incomplete and inconsistent and an ap- proximation of concepts is needed. The classical approach works for discrete data and allows only nominal classification. To induce the best rules, access to all available information is ad- vantageous, which can be endangered if discretisation is a necessary step in the data preparation stage. Discretisation, even executed with taking into account class labels of instances, brings some information loss. The research methodology illustrated in this paper is dedicated to ex- tended transformations of continuous input features into categorical, with the goal of enhancing the performance of rule-based classifiers, constructed with rough set data mining. The experi- ments were carried out in the stylometry domain, with its key task of authorship attribution. The obtained results indicate that supporting supervised discretisation with elements of unsuper- vised transformations can lead to enhanced predictions, which shows the merits of the proposed research framework