Multi crteria decision making and its applications : a literature review

This paper presents current techniques used in Multi Criteria Decision Making (MCDM) and their applications. Two basic approaches for MCDM, namely Artificial Intelligence MCDM (AIMCDM) and Classical MCDM (CMCDM) are discussed and investigated. Recent articles from international journals related to MCDM are collected and analyzed to find which approach is more common than the other in MCDM. Also, which area these techniques are applied to. Those articles are appearing in journals for the year 2008 only. This paper provides evidence that currently, both AIMCDM and CMCDM are equally common in MCDM

The development of a parallel multi agent system for association rule mining

The continuous growth of the information on the Internet makes it necessary for users to be provided with a convenient and yet accurate tools to capture the information needed. Web usage mining has gained more popularity among researchers in discovering the users browsing behavior by mining the web server log that records all the users transactions activities. By applying it into the recommendation engine, Web personalization can be executed based on the discovered users behavior. Nevertheless, the efficiency of the generated recommendations is still an issue for reseachers. This final report focusing on the development of a usage model for predictions based on association rule and similarity measures, named ARsim. Model development will used agent technology to improve data processing time and generate recommendations rules. Aglet 1.1b3 will be agent platform for this model development. Additional parameter was used to measure the similarities between URLs, which is the time user spend on a particular page. To generate the final recommendation, similarity between URLs contained in the active user profile was calculated upon the matched Web usage profiles and finally the top-N most similar URLs are then recommended to the user. Three evaluation metrics, which is commonly used by other researchers for evaluation of Web page recommendation model, was applied to evaluate the efficacy of ARsim, namely precision, coverage and F1. Comparison to two other different techniques, traditional association rule and eVZpro found that the integration of rules and similaty measures allow only the most appropriate URLs to be recommended and thus increase the efficiency of the Web page recommendation engine

Using fuzzy analytic hierarchy process for southern Johor river ranking

This paper presents the application of fuzzy set theory in multi criteria decision making (MCDM). Fuzzy Analytic Hierarchy Process (FAHP) technique will be used to rank alternatives to find the most reasonable and efficient use of river system. The overall aspects of river system including both qualitative and quantitative are emphasized. Four criteria and 20 subcriteria have been identified and compared. Fuzzy numbers and linguistic variables are presented to address inherently uncertain or imprecise data. The technique is tested to real rivers data. A comparison between the proposed technique and the previous results obtained using conventional techniques is presente

Conceptions and alternative assessment practice in Malaysian higher education

Malaysian government has specifically called for assessment reform in higher education to align with the current needs. In most practices, educators in higher education implemented both of traditional and alternative assessments but lack of empirical studies on alternative assessments. Thus, this study aimed to examine and analyse the assessment conceptions and the alternative assessment practices among educators in one of Malaysia premiere research university. This study randomly selected 118 respondents form three different clusters; Engineering (E), Social Sciences and Humanities (SSH) and Sciences and Technology (ST) to respond to a questionnaire known as Conceptions and Alternative Assessment Survey (CETAS). Based on Rasch Measurement Model analysis using Winsteps, this study found that, regardless of different clustering and level of teaching experiences, educators in this premiere research university shown positive conceptions of assessment and have been frequently practicing various alternative assessment to assess their students learning. As this study only investigate the issue descriptively, it is recommended that future study could examine the correlation between the two constructs; conception (4 dimensions) and practice (8 types of alternative assessment) in the context of other research universities, similarly public and private universities in Malaysia