Abstract
Owing to the complexity and uncertainty of scientific research projects, government-funded institutions often invite multiple peer experts to evaluate the projects. How to aggregate the evaluation opinions of multiple peer experts is an important issue. With consideration of the experts’ knowledge background and historical evaluation performance, this paper proposes an evidential reasoning approach under two-dimensional frames of discernment to aggregate the evaluation opinions of multiple experts. Firstly, two-dimensional frames of discernment are constructed. The I-dimensional frame of discernment describes experts’ evaluation opinions, and the II-dimensional frame of discernment describes experts’ knowledge background and historical evaluation performance. Experts’ evaluation opinions and characteristic information are transformed into pieces of evidence, which could be expressed by their respective belief distributions. Secondly, the II-dimensional evidence information is used to generate the evidence correction factor to reflect experts’ reliabilities. Finally, the experts’ evaluation opinions are corrected using the evidence correction factors. Thus, the corrected experts’ evaluation opinions contain the experts’ characteristic information. In addition, the evidential reasoning approach is used to aggregate the evaluation opinions of multiple experts to complete the selection of the scientific research projects. An illustrative example on aggregating the evaluation opinions of the National Natural Science Foundation of China is provided to demonstrate the applicability and validity of the proposed method. Experimental results show that the proposed method can enhance the description of uncertainty in experts’ evaluation opinions, reflect the qualities of the experts’ evaluation opinions, and make the aggregation results of multiple experts’ evaluation opinions more reasonable and accurate.
Highlights
The selection of scientific research projects is an important decision-making activity of government-funded institutions [1], [2]
To reflect the differences among the review experts during the aggregation of opinions, this paper proposes a novel information fusion method based on the evidential reasoning (ER) approach [12] under two-dimensional frames of discernment
Peer review is a common method that is used by governmentfunded institutions to select scientific research projects
Summary
The selection of scientific research projects is an important decision-making activity of government-funded institutions [1], [2]. W. Zhu et al.: Evaluation Information Fusion of Scientific Research Project Based on ER Approach submission, preliminary evaluation of projects, peer review, aggregation of experts’ opinions and panel evaluation [7]. Zhu et al.: Evaluation Information Fusion of Scientific Research Project Based on ER Approach submission, preliminary evaluation of projects, peer review, aggregation of experts’ opinions and panel evaluation [7] Among these procedures, peer review is the most important basis of scientific research project selection. Under the premise of selecting peer review experts, the experts’ evaluation opinions should be enriched by considering their characteristic information to reflect their differences in the process of aggregating opinions and ensure the impartiality of project selection. To reflect the differences among the review experts during the aggregation of opinions, this paper proposes a novel information fusion method based on the evidential reasoning (ER) approach [12] under two-dimensional frames of discernment.
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a callDisclaimer: All third-party content on this website/platform is and will remain the property of their respective owners and is provided on "as is" basis without any warranties, express or implied. Use of third-party content does not indicate any affiliation, sponsorship with or endorsement by them. Any references to third-party content is to identify the corresponding services and shall be considered fair use under The CopyrightLaw.
