International Journal of Information Technology & Decision Making

This paper gives a brief overview of the well-known impossibility-possibility theorem in constructing a social welfare function from individual functions. The Analytic Hierarchy Process uses a fundamental scale of absolute numbers to represent judgments about dominance in paired comparisons. It is shown that it is possible to derive such a function in two ways. One is from the synthesized functions of the judgments of each of the individuals. The other is obtained by first combining corresponding pairwise comparison judgments made by all the individuals, thus obtaining a matrix of combined judgments for the group and then deriving a welfare function for the group. With consistency the four conditions imposed by Arrow are satisfied. With inconsistency, an additional condition is needed.

Although a users' opinion or a live voice is a very useful information for text mining of the business, it is difficult to extract good and bad reputations of users from texts written in natural language. The good and bad reputations discussed here depend on users' claims, interests and demands. This paper presents a method of determining these reputations in commodity review sentences. Multi-attribute rule is introduced to extract the reputations from sentences, and four-stage-rules are defined in order to evaluate good and bad reputations step by step. A deterministic multi-attribute pattern matching algorithm is utilized to determine the reputations efficiently.

From simulation results for 2,240 review comments, it is verified that the multi-attribute pattern matching algorithm is 63.1 times faster than the Aho and Corasick method. The precision and recall of extracted reputations for each commodity are 94% and 93% respectively. Moreover, the precision and recall of the resulting reputations for each rule are 95% and 95% respectively.

The pure linguistic multiple attribute decision making problems are studied, in which the information about the attribute weights are expressed in the form of linguistic variables or uncertain linguistic variables, and the attribute values take the form of uncertain linguistic variables. The operational laws of uncertain linguistic variables are introduced, and two uncertain linguistic aggregation operators called linguistic weighted aggregation operator and uncertain linguistic weighted aggregation operator are developed based on uncertain linguistic variables and their operational laws. An approach based on the developed operators for pure linguistic multiple attribute decision making under uncertainty is proposed. The prominent characteristic of the proposed approach is that it can compute with uncertain linguistic information directly. Furthermore, the approach is straightforward and does not produce any loss of information. Finally, an illustrative example is given.

In computerized tutoring, the pace of instruction is related to the student's mastery levels of the learning objectives. The observable student's behavior that can be used to measure his knowledge is usually his responses to test items. Unobservable variables that are related to learner's motivation can affect learning but are difficult to quantify. In comparison with other decision-theoretic tutoring systems, the novelties of this research are: (1) the efficiency-centric approach to develop the Bayesian networks; (2) the formulation of utility values for different tutoring outcomes that are independent of past actions and to satisfy the separability condition; (3) the development of a common measure for student's mastery levels and item difficulties; and (4) the generation of optimal policies in polynomial time. A prototype web-based tutoring system, known as iTutor, incorporating the novelties has been developed for engineering mechanics. Formative evaluations of iTutor have shown encouraging results.

As many software systems migrate their component communication to the web service paradigm, security becomes an immediate concern. Many existing solutions cannot handle complex situations involving the user, session, application, and any number of XML inter-related documents. The learner information management web service we develop for an e-learning environment has to control access of inter-related XML documents representing different roles of users in the e-learning environment. In this paper, we present an authentication and authorization model for web services that provides access control of inter-related XML documents. This scheme works especially well when the documents that will be operated on are organized in hierarchical structures, like the collections in a native XML database.

Outlier detection targets those exceptional data whose pattern is rare and lie in low density regions. In this paper, under the assumption of complete spatial randomness inside clusters, we propose an MDV (Multi-scale Deviation of the Volume) approach to identifying outliers. In addition to assigning an outlier score for each object, it directly outputs a crisp outlier set. It also offers a plot showing the data structure in every object's vicinity, which is useful in explaining why it may be outlying. Finally, the effectiveness of MDV is demonstrated with both artificial and real datasets.

This study explores the use of rough-set methods for marketing decision support systems in the retail business. A tutorial presentation of Rough Set Data Analysis (RSDA) in the context of knowledge discovery from time series databases is given. We show how an RSDA model can be used to develop a marketing decision support system which can capture the complex relationships between marketing factors, such as advertising and promotion, and the total impact on sales levels in order to find influential advertising strategies. This information is used by the business manager to make faster and better strategy decisions for the business to survive in the rapidly changing and competitive environments. The data set used for RSDA application example contains weekly investments in different media categories: TV, radio, cinema, morning press, evening press, popular press, special interest press, and outdoor posters; for seven makes of cars in the Swedish market.

As international corporate activities increase, the staffing of their operations involves more strategic concerns. However, foreign assignments have many differences, and dissatisfaction with host country is a known cause of expatriate failure. This study distinguishes from previous studies, which focused on the expatriate selection process from the viewpoint of the human resource managers. From the view of expatriate candidate's points, this paper describes a fuzzy analytic hierarchy process (fuzzy AHP) to determine the weighting of subjective judgments. When the expatriate assignments are evaluated from various aspects, such as employee personal factors, employee competencies, job characteristics, family factors, environmental factors and organization relocation support activities, it can be regarded as an fuzzy multiple criteria decision making (FMCDM) problem. Since expatriate candidates cannot clearly estimate the relative importance of each considered criterion in terms of numerical values, fuzziness is applicable. Consequently, this paper uses triangular fuzzy numbers by fuzzy AHP to establish weights for expatriate candidates, thus determining the relative importance for criteria of expatriate assignments. From the insights of this study, this article addresses this expatriate problem and offers guidelines for managers concerned with a successful expatriate assignment program.

The phenomenal growth of information and communication technology (ICT) especially the Internet has affected youths in developed and developing countries alike. Although progressing at a slower rate in developing countries than in any other parts of the world, Internet connectivity is also transforming the face of Africa.

This paper presents a study that examines what Nigerian youths use Internet for and which of the Internet use has adverse effect on the youth's social life. It reveals that majority of youths use Internet for e-mail, making use of Yahoo followed by Hotmail, and the study also reveals that over 50% of youths interviewed visit pornographic sites.