An analysis of expert-opined strategies in multi-attribute decision-making using effort propagation

Mining the interrelationships and possible hierarchical structures among the factors in real-world multi-attribute decision-making (MADM) problems is considered one of the primary tasks. One major task is determining an optimal strategy to work on the factors to enhance the effect on the goal attribute. This paper proposes two such strategies: parallel and hierarchical effort assignment and propagation strategies. We formally define and describe the concept of effort propagation through a strategy. Both the parallel and hierarchical strategies are divided into sub-strategies based on whether the assignment of efforts to the factors is uniform or depends upon some appropriate heuristics related to the factors in the system. The adapted and discussed heuristics are the factors' relative significance and effort propagability. The strategies are analyzed for a real-life case study regarding high school administrative factors that enhance students' performance. Total effort propagation of around 7%-15% to the goal is seen across the proposed strategies, given a total of 1 unit of effort to the directly accessible factors of the system. A comparative analysis is adapted to determine the optimal strategy among the proposed ones to enhance student performance effectively. The highest effort propagation achieved in the work is approximately 14.4348%. The analysis establishes the necessity of research towards the direction of effort propagation analysis in case of decision-making problems.