Aggregating opinions in non-uniform ordered qualitative scales

Producción CientíficaThis paper introduces a new voting system in the setting of ordered qualitative scales. The process is conducted in a purely ordinal way by considering an ordinal proximity measure that assigns an ordinal degree of proximity to each pair of linguistic terms of the qualitative scale. Once the agents assess the alternatives through the qualitative scale, the alternatives are ranked according to the medians of the ordinal degrees of proximity between the obtained individual assessments and the highest linguistic term of the scale. Since some alternatives may share the same median, an appropriate tie-breaking procedure is introduced. Some properties of the proposed voting system have been provided.Ministerio de Economía, Industria y Competitividad (Project ECO2016-77900-P

Sustainable R&D portfolio assessment.

Research and development portfolio management is traditionally technologically and financially dominated, with little or no attention to the sustainable focus, which represents the triple bottom line: not only financial (and technical) issues but also human and environmental values. This is mainly due to the lack of quantified and reliable data on the human aspects of product/service development: usability, ecology, ethics, product experience, perceived quality etc. Even if these data are available, then consistent decision support tools are not ready available. Based on the findings from an industry review, we developed a DEA model that permits to support strategic R&D portfolio management. We underscore the usability of this approach with real life examples from two different industries: consumables and materials manufacturing (polymers).R&D portfolio management; Data envelopment analysis; Sustainable R&D;

Measuring dispersion in the context of ordered qualitative scales

Producción CientíficaThe main purpose of this contribution is to measure the dispersion associated with the different results of a variable when they form a set of linguistic terms obtained after examining different qualities of people, services, etc, ordered, but with a non-homogeneous and non-quantifiable distance between the linguistic terms.Ministerio de Economía, Industria y Competitividad (project ECO2016-77900-P

A kernel-based framework for learning graded relations from data

Driven by a large number of potential applications in areas like bioinformatics, information retrieval and social network analysis, the problem setting of inferring relations between pairs of data objects has recently been investigated quite intensively in the machine learning community. To this end, current approaches typically consider datasets containing crisp relations, so that standard classification methods can be adopted. However, relations between objects like similarities and preferences are often expressed in a graded manner in real-world applications. A general kernel-based framework for learning relations from data is introduced here. It extends existing approaches because both crisp and graded relations are considered, and it unifies existing approaches because different types of graded relations can be modeled, including symmetric and reciprocal relations. This framework establishes important links between recent developments in fuzzy set theory and machine learning. Its usefulness is demonstrated through various experiments on synthetic and real-world data.Comment: This work has been submitted to the IEEE for possible publication. Copyright may be transferred without notice, after which this version may no longer be accessibl

Ordinal proximity measures in the context of unbalanced qualitativescales and some applications to consensus and clustering

Producción CientíficaIn this paper, we introduce ordinal proximity measures in the setting of unbalanced qualitative scales by comparing the proximities between linguistic terms without numbers, in a purely ordinal approach. With this new tool, we propose how to measure the consensus in a set of agents when they assess a set of alternatives through an unbalanced qualitative scale. We also introduce an agglomerative hierarchical clustering procedure based on these consensus measures.Ministerio de Economía, Industria y Competitividad (ECO2012-32178)Junta de Castilla y León (programa de apoyo a proyectos de investigación – Ref. VA066U13