Title: On the usefulness of taking the weights into account in the GAIA visualisations

Authors: Ph. Nemery, K. Lidouh, B. Mareschal

Addresses: Department of Mathematics, University of Portsmouth, Portsmouth, UK. ' CoDE-SMG, Engineering Faculty, Universite Libre de Bruxelles, Brussels, Belgium. ' Solvay Brussels School of Economics and Management, Universite Libre de Bruxelles, Brussels, Belgium

Abstract: In this paper we study the multicriteria decision aid (MCDA) methods PROMETHEE and GAIA. The PROMETHEE method provides the decision maker with a ranking. The GAIA method provides a two dimensional representation of the decision problem based on the flows computed by the PROMETHEE method. However, a limit of the GAIA method is the loss of information by its two-dimensional projection which may lead to inconsistencies with the PROMETHEE rankings. Recently, some extensions of the GAIA method have been proposed in Hayez et al. (2009) in order to decrease the number of inconsistencies. We propose in our paper to slightly adapt the proposed GAIA methods by taking the weights into account when representing the problem. The aim of this paper is thus to analyse the impact on the gain or loss of information of the GAIA. Different illustrative examples are given and numerical simulations have been made to justify this approach.

Keywords: multicriteria decision analysis; MCDA; GAIA; PROMETHEE; information visualisation; decision making; weighting; information gain; information loss; weights.

DOI: 10.1504/IJIDS.2011.041585

International Journal of Information and Decision Sciences, 2011 Vol.3 No.3, pp.228 - 251

Published online: 30 Oct 2014 *

Full-text access for editors Full-text access for subscribers Purchase this article Comment on this article