FlowSort parameters elicitation based on categorisation examples

Abstract

In multi-criteria sorting methods, it is often difficult for decision makers to precisely define their preferences. It is even harder to express them into parameters values. The idea of this work is to automatically find the parameters of a sorting model using classification examples in the contexts of traditional sorting and interval sorting. Interval sorting, i.e., the possible assignment of alternatives into several successive categories, is defined in this paper. The sorting method we are working with is FlowSort, which is based on the PROMETHEE methodology. Starting with an evaluation table and known allocations, we propose a heuristic based on a genetic algorithm (GA) to identify the weights, indifference and preference thresholds but also profiles characterising the categories. We illustrate both the performances of the algorithm and the quality of the solutions on three standard datasets in both cases.