Attribute significance based on inclusion degree for incomplete information systems and their applications to MADM problems

Abstract

Attribute significance is very important in multiple-attribute decision-making (MADM) problems. In a MADM problem, the significance of attributes is often different. In order to overcome the shortcoming that attribute significance is usually given artificially. The purpose of this paper is to give attribute significance computation formulas based on inclusion degree. We note that in the real-world application, there is a lot of incomplete information due to the error of data measurement, the limitation of data understanding and data acquisition, etc. Firstly, we give a general description and the definition of incomplete information systems. We then establish the tolerance relation for incomplete linguistic information system, with the tolerance classes and inclusion degree, significance of attribute is proposed and the corresponding computation formula is obtained. Subsequently, for incomplete fuzzy information system and incomplete interval-valued fuzzy information system, the dominance relation and interval dominance relation is established, respectively. And the dominance class and interval dominance class of an element are got as well. With the help of inclusion degree, the computation formulas of attribute significance for incomplete fuzzy information system and incomplete interval-valued fuzzy information system are also obtained. At the same time, results show that the reduction of attribute set can be obtained by computing the significance of attributes in these incomplete information systems. Finally, as the applications of attribute significance, the attribute significance is viewed as attribute weights to solve MADM problems and the corresponding TOPSIS methods for three incomplete information systems are proposed. The numerical examples are also employed to illustrate the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed approaches.