Propagation of Uncertainty by the Possibility Theory in Choquet Integral-Based Decision Making: Application to an E-Commerce Website Choice Support

Abstract

This paper is concerned with some aspects of uncertainty evaluations in multicriteria decision making (MCDM) in the framework of e-commerce website recommendation. The emphasis is on the interest of handling uncertainty with possibility distributions in the MCDM process where evaluations coming from the users present variability. Thus, the authors consider the propagation of possibility distributions through the multicriteria aggregation made by a Choquet integral that takes into account the interactions between the decision-making criteria. To support the recommendation process, location and uncertainty indicators of possibility distributions are defined, as well as their marginal contributions to the aggregated result. The proposed approach is applied here to the problem of the choice of an e-commerce website for purchase purposes, but it can also be used for dealing with uncertainty in other complex problems