Explainable multi-criteria decision-making: A three-way decision perspective
Chengjun Shi, Yiyu Y. Yao · International Journal of Approximate Reasoning · 2025
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.