No Arabic abstract
A ranking is an ordered sequence of items, in which an item with higher ranking score is more preferred than the items with lower ranking scores. In many information systems, rankings are widely used to represent the preferences over a set of items or candidates. The consensus measure of rankings is the problem of how to evaluate the degree to which the rankings agree. The consensus measure can be used to evaluate rankings in many information systems, as quite often there is not ground truth available for evaluation. This paper introduces a novel approach for consensus measure of rankings by using graph representation, in which the vertices or nodes are the items and the edges are the relationship of items in the rankings. Such representation leads to various algorithms for consensus measure in terms of different aspects of rankings, including the number of common patterns, the number of common patterns with fixed length and the length of the longest common patterns. The proposed measure can be adopted for various types of rankings, such as full rankings, partial rankings and rankings with ties. This paper demonstrates how the proposed approaches can be used to evaluate the quality of rank aggregation and the quality of top-$k$ rankings from Google and Bing search engines.
Rankings, representing preferences over a set of candidates, are widely used in many information systems, e.g., group decision making and information retrieval. It is of great importance to evaluate the consensus of the obtained rankings from multiple agents. An overall measure of the consensus degree provides an insight into the ranking data. Moreover, it could provide a quantitative indicator for consensus comparison between groups and further improvement of a ranking system. Existing studies are insufficient in assessing the overall consensus of a ranking set. They did not provide an evaluation of the consensus degree of preference patterns in most rankings. In this paper, a novel consensus quantifying approach, without the need for any correlation or distance functions as in existing studies of consensus, is proposed based on a concept of q-support patterns of rankings. The q-support patterns represent the commonality embedded in a set of rankings. A method for detecting outliers in a set of rankings is naturally derived from the proposed consensus quantifying approach. Experimental studies are conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.
Consensus Sequences of event logs are often used in process mining to quickly grasp the core sequence of events to be performed in a process, or to represent the backbone of the process for doing other analyses. However, it is still not clear how many traces are enough to properly represent the underlying process. In this paper, we propose a novel sampling strategy to determine the number of traces necessary to produce a representative consensus sequence. We show how to estimate the difference between the predefined Expert Model and the real processes carried out. This difference level can be used as reference for domain experts to adjust the Expert Model. In addition, we apply this strategy to several real-world workflow activity datasets as a case study. We show a sample curve fitting task to help readers better understand our proposed methodology.
In group decision making (GDM) problems fuzzy preference relations (FPR) are widely used for representing decision makers opinions on the set of alternatives. In order to avoid misleading solutions, the study of consistency and consensus has become a very important aspect. This article presents a simulated annealing (SA) based soft computing approach to optimize the consistency/consensus level (CCL) of a complete fuzzy preference relation in order to solve a GDM problem. Consistency level indicates as experts preference quality and consensus level measures the degree of agreement among experts opinions. This study also suggests the set of experts for the necessary modifications in their prescribed preference structures without intervention of any moderator.
Most works related to unithood were conducted as part of a larger effort for the determination of termhood. Consequently, the number of independent research that study the notion of unithood and produce dedicated techniques for measuring unithood is extremely small. We propose a new approach, independent of any influences of termhood, that provides dedicated measures to gather linguistic evidence from parsed text and statistical evidence from Google search engine for the measurement of unithood. Our evaluations revealed a precision and recall of 98.68% and 91.82% respectively with an accuracy at 95.42% in measuring the unithood of 1005 test cases.
This paper presents a method to compute the degree of similarity between two aggregated fuzzy numbers from intervals using the Interval Agreement Approach (IAA). The similarity measure proposed within this study contains several features and attributes, of which are novel to aggregated fuzzy numbers. The attributes completely redefined or modified within this study include area, perimeter, centroids, quartiles and the agreement ratio. The recommended weighting for each feature has been learned using Principal Component Analysis (PCA). Furthermore, an illustrative example is provided to detail the application and potential future use of the similarity measure.