•A cosine maximization method (CM) based on the similarity measure.•An optimization model for the CM to derive a reliable priority vector from a pair-wise comparison matrix.•Compare CM with other ...prioritization methods based on two performance evaluation: Euclidean distance and minimum violation.•Induce a consistency index for a pair-wise comparison matrix based on the CM.
The derivation of a priority vector from a pair-wise comparison matrix (PCM) is an important issue in the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP). The existing methods for the priority vector derivation from PCM include eigenvector method (EV), weighted least squares method (WLS), additive normalization method (AN), logarithmic least squares method (LLS), etc. The derived priority vector should be as similar to each column vector of the PCM as possible if a pair-wise comparison matrix (PCM) is not perfectly consistent. Therefore, a cosine maximization method (CM) based on similarity measure is proposed, which maximizes the sum of the cosine of the angle between the priority vector and each column vector of a PCM. An optimization model for the CM is proposed to derive the reliable priority vector. Using three numerical examples, the CM is compared with the other prioritization methods based on two performance evaluation criteria: Euclidean distance and minimum violation. The results show that the CM is flexible and efficient.
The evaluation of clustering algorithms is intrinsically difficult because of the lack of objective measures. Since the evaluation of clustering algorithms normally involves multiple criteria, it can ...be modeled as a multiple criteria decision making (MCDM) problem. This paper presents an MCDM-based approach to rank a selection of popular clustering algorithms in the domain of financial risk analysis. An experimental study is designed to validate the proposed approach using three MCDM methods, six clustering algorithms, and eleven cluster validity indices over three real-life credit risk and bankruptcy risk data sets. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of MCDM methods in evaluating clustering algorithms and indicate that the repeated-bisection method leads to good 2-way clustering solutions on the selected financial risk data sets.
"AHP/ANP theory and its application in technological and economic development: the 90th anniversary of Thomas L. Saaty." Technological and Economic Development of Economy, 22(5), pp. 649–650
Financial technology (Fintech) makes a significant contribution to the financial system by reducing costs, providing higher quality services and increasing customer satisfaction. Hence, new studies ...play an essential role to improve Fintech investments. This study evaluates Fintech-based investments of European banking services with an application of an original methodology that considers interval type-2 (IT2) fuzzy decision-making trial and evaluation laboratory and IT2 fuzzy TOPSIS models. Empirical findings are controlled for consistency by applying the VIKOR method. Moreover, we conduct a sensitivity analysis by considering six distinct cases. This study contributes to the existing literature by identifying the most important Fintech-based investment alternatives to improve the financial performance of European banks. Our empirical findings illustrate that results are coherent, reliable, and identify "competitive advantage" as the most important factor among Fintech-based determinants. Moreover, "payment and money transferring systems" are the most important Fintech-based investment alternatives. It is recommended that, among Fintech-based investments, European banks should mainly focus on payment and money transferring alternatives to attract the attention of customers and satisfy their expectations. This is also believed to have a positive impact on the ease of bank' receivable collection. Another important point is that Fintech-based investments in money transferring systems could help to decrease costs.
The measurement scales, consistency index, inconsistency issues, missing judgment estimation and priority derivation methods have been extensively studied in the pairwise comparison matrix (PCM). ...Various approaches have been proposed to handle these problems, and made great contributions to the decision making. This paper reviews the literature of the main developments of the PCM. There are plenty of literature related to these issues, thus we mainly focus on the literature published in 37 peer reviewed international journals from 2010 to 2015 (searched via ISI Web of science). We attempt to analyze and classify these literatures so as to find the current hot research topics and research techniques in the PCM, and point out the future directions on the PCM. It is hoped that this paper will provide a comprehensive literature review on PCM, and act as informative summary of the main developments of the PCM for the researchers for their future research.
•Trust and reputation systems in social networks are analysed.•Approaches of opinion dynamics in group decision making are reviewed.•Main challenges and future research are pointed out.
On-line ...platforms foster the communication capabilities of the Internet to develop large-scale influence networks in which the quality of the interactions can be evaluated based on trust and reputation. So far, this technology is well known for building trust and harnessing cooperation in on-line marketplaces, such as Amazon (www.amazon.com) and eBay (www.ebay.es). However, these mechanisms are poised to have a broader impact on a wide range of scenarios, from large scale decision making procedures, such as the ones implied in e-democracy, to trust based recommendations on e-health context or influence and performance assessment in e-marketing and e-learning systems. This contribution surveys the progress in understanding the new possibilities and challenges that trust and reputation systems pose. To do so, it discusses trust, reputation and influence which are important measures in networked based communication mechanisms to support the worthiness of information, products, services opinions and recommendations. The existent mechanisms to estimate and propagate trust and reputation, in distributed networked scenarios, and how these measures can be integrated in decision making to reach consensus among the agents are analysed. Furthermore, it also provides an overview of the relevant work in opinion dynamics and influence assessment, as part of social networks. Finally, it identifies challenges and research opportunities on how the so called trust based network can be leveraged as an influence measure to foster decision making processes and recommendation mechanisms in complex social networks scenarios with uncertain knowledge, like the mentioned in e-health and e-marketing frameworks.
In malicious URLs detection, traditional classifiers are challenged because the data volume is huge, patterns are changing over time, and the correlations among features are complicated. Feature ...engineering plays an important role in addressing these problems. To better represent the underlying problem and improve the performances of classifiers in identifying malicious URLs, this paper proposed a combination of linear and non-linear space transformation methods. For linear transformation, a two-stage distance metric learning approach was developed: first, singular value decomposition was performed to get an orthogonal space, and then a linear programming was used to solve an optimal distance metric. For nonlinear transformation, we introduced Nyström method for kernel approximation and used the revised distance metric for its radial basis function such that the merits of both linear and non-linear transformations can be utilized. 33,1622 URLs with 62 features were collected to validate the proposed feature engineering methods. The results showed that the proposed methods significantly improved the efficiency and performance of certain classifiers, such as k-Nearest Neighbor, Support Vector Machine, and neural networks. The malicious URLs’ identification rate of k-Nearest Neighbor was increased from 68% to 86%, the rate of linear Support Vector Machine was increased from 58% to 81%, and the rate of Multi-Layer Perceptron was increased from 63% to 82%. We also developed a website to demonstrate a malicious URLs detection system which uses the methods proposed in this paper. The system can be accessed at: http://url.jspfans.com.
•Linear and non-linear space transformation methods for malicious URLs detection.•331622 URLs with 62 features were collected to validate the proposed methods.•The proposed methods can improve the efficiency and performance of classifiers.•A website was developed using the proposed methods to predict malicious URLs.
There has been significant research into reject inference, with several statistical methods and machine learning techniques having been employed to infer the possible repayment behavior of rejected ...credit applicants. This study proposes a novel three-stage reject inference learning framework using unsupervised transfer learning and three-way decision theory that integrates: (1) the rejected credit sample selection using three-way decision theory, (2) higher-level representations to transfer learning from both accepted and selected rejected credit samples; and (3) credit scoring using the reconstructed accepted credit samples. This method was found to both perform well for reject inference and handle negative transfer learning problems. The numerical results were validated on Chinese credit data, the results from which demonstrated the superiority of the proposed reject inference method for credit risk management applications.
•Three-stage reject inference learning framework based on transfer learning was proposed for credit scoring.•The proposed three-stage learning framework effectively addressed the negative transfer problem.•We validated the proposed learning framework by Chinese credit data.•The proposed learning framework significantly enhanced credit scoring performance.•The proposed method outperformed classical reject inference models.
In many financial applications, such as fraud detection, reject inference, and credit evaluation, detecting clusters automatically is critical because it helps to understand the subpatterns of the ...data that can be used to infer user's behaviors and identify potential risks. Due to the complexity of human behaviors and changing social environments, the distributions of financial data are usually complex and it is challenging to find clusters and give reasonable interpretations. The goal of this study is to develop an integrated approach to detect clusters in financial data, and optimize the scope of the clusters such that the clusters can be easily interpreted. Specifically, we first proposed a new cluster quality evaluation criterion, which is free from large-scale computation and can guide base clustering algorithms such as <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">{k} </tex-math></inline-formula>-Means to detect hyperellipsoidal clusters adaptively. Then, we designed a new solver for a revised support vector data description model, which efficiently refines the centroids and scopes of the detected clusters to make the clusters tighter such that the data in the clusters share greater similarities, and thus, the clusters can be easily interpreted with eigenvectors. Using ten financial datasets, the experiments showed that the proposed algorithm can efficiently find reasonable number of clusters. The proposed approach is suitable for large-scale financial datasets whose features are meaningful, and also applicable to financial mining tasks, such as data distribution interpretation and anomaly detection.
•A review of the consensus processes in social network group decision making is presented.•Two approaches are identified: consensus based on trust relationships and based on opinion ...evolution.•Challenges and research future fields are presented.
In social network group decision making (SNGDM), the consensus reaching process (CRP) is used to help decision makers with social relationships reach consensus. Many CRP studies have been conducted in SNGDM until now. This paper provides a review of CRPs in SNGDM, and as a result it classifies them into two paradigms: (i) the CRP paradigm based on trust relationships, and (ii) the CRP paradigm based on opinion evolution. Furthermore, identified research challenges are put forward to advance this area of research.
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