Explaining Results of Multi-Criteria Decision Making

Martin Erwig; Prashant Kumar

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arXiv · 2209.04582

Explaining Results of Multi-Criteria Decision Making

Martin Erwig·Prashant Kumar

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Abstract

We introduce a method for explaining the results of various linear and hierarchical multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) techniques such as WSM and AHP. The two key ideas are (A) to maintain a fine-grained representation of the values manipulated by these techniques and (B) to derive explanations from these representations through merging, filtering, and aggregating operations. An explanation in our model presents a high-level comparison of two alternatives in an MCDM problem, presumably an optimal and a non-optimal one, illuminating why one alternative was preferred over the other one. We show the usefulness of our techniques by generating explanations for two well-known examples from the MCDM literature. Finally, we show their efficacy by performing computational experiments.

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Martin Erwig, Prashant Kumar. 2022-09-10. Explaining Results of Multi-Criteria Decision Making. https://arxiv.org/abs/2209.04582

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