Reconciliation of Decision-Making Heuristics Based on Decision Trees Topologies and Incomplete Fuzzy Probabilities Sets

PLoS One. 2015 Jul 9;10(7):e0131590. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0131590. eCollection 2015.

Abstract

Complex decision making tasks of different natures, e.g. economics, safety engineering, ecology and biology, are based on vague, sparse, partially inconsistent and subjective knowledge. Moreover, decision making economists / engineers are usually not willing to invest too much time into study of complex formal theories. They require such decisions which can be (re)checked by human like common sense reasoning. One important problem related to realistic decision making tasks are incomplete data sets required by the chosen decision making algorithm. This paper presents a relatively simple algorithm how some missing III (input information items) can be generated using mainly decision tree topologies and integrated into incomplete data sets. The algorithm is based on an easy to understand heuristics, e.g. a longer decision tree sub-path is less probable. This heuristic can solve decision problems under total ignorance, i.e. the decision tree topology is the only information available. But in a practice, isolated information items e.g. some vaguely known probabilities (e.g. fuzzy probabilities) are usually available. It means that a realistic problem is analysed under partial ignorance. The proposed algorithm reconciles topology related heuristics and additional fuzzy sets using fuzzy linear programming. The case study, represented by a tree with six lotteries and one fuzzy probability, is presented in details.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Algorithms
  • Decision Making / physiology*
  • Decision Support Techniques
  • Decision Trees*
  • Fuzzy Logic*
  • Heuristics / physiology*
  • Humans
  • Models, Theoretical
  • Probability

Grants and funding

This paper was supported by grants FP-S-15-2825 "Economic Determinants of Competitiveness of Enterprises in Central and Eastern Europe" and FP-S-15-2787 "Effective Use of ICT and Quantitative Methods for Business Processes Optimization" from the Internal Grant Agency at Brno University of Technology."Support was also received from the Internal Grant Agency at Brno University of Technology Grant number: FP-S-13-2148 'The Application of ICT and Mathematical Methods in Business Management' Grant Recipient: Institute of Informatics, Faculty of Business and Management Resposnibility: Doc. RNDr. Bedrich Puze, CSc. Additional support was provided by the Internal Grant Agency at Brno University of Technology Grant number: FP-S-13-2052 'Microeconomic and macroeconomic principles and their impact on corporate behaviour Grant Recipient: Institute of Economics, Faculty of Business and Management Resposnibility: prof. Ing. Oldrich Rejnus, CSc. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.