OWA Aggregation of Probability Distributions Using the Probabilistic Exceedance Method

Abstract

We note the use of the OWA Operator in multi-criteria decision problems for aggregating the individual criteria satisfactions. We consider the situation where the criteria satisfactions have some uncertainty, are finite probability distributions. We note the requirement of needing to order these probability distributions. We note it is often not possible to obtain the required ordering over probability distributions. To circumvent this problem we introduce an approach called the Probabilistic Exceedance Method, PEM, which allows us to provide a surrogate for the OWA aggregation of probability distributions that doesn’t require a linear ordering over the probability distributions.