Explainable multi-criteria decision-making: A three-way decision perspective
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper proposes an Explainable Multi-Criteria Decision-Making (XMCDM) framework that constructs trilevel explanations with respect to classic multi-criteria decision-making methods. The framework consists of explainable data preparation, explainable decision analysis, and explainable decision support, which integrates ideas from three-way decision and symbols-meaning-value spaces. First, we briefly introduce the key concepts at each level and list potential issues to be resolved, including gathering multi-criteria data, interpreting multi-criteria decision-making working principles, and offering effective outcome presentation. We examine existing literature that solves part of those questions and point out that rule-based explanations may be applicable and efficient to explain ranking/ordering results. Then, we discuss two methods that generate three-way rankings with respect to an individual criterion and integrate three-way rankings with multi-criteria ranking. We modify the Iterative Dichotomiser 3 algorithm to build rule-based explanations. Finally, after giving a small illustrative example, we design experiments on five real-life datasets, test explainability of three classic multi-criteria decision-making methods, and tune the thresholds. The experimental results demonstrate that our proposed framework is feasible and adaptable to various data characteristics.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.019 | 0.027 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".