DOMINANCE-BASED EXTENSION OF STEPCLASS FOR MULTIATTRIBUTE NOMINAL CLASSIFICATION

The problem of knowledge-based multiattribute classification with nonorderable classes is considered within the Verbal Decision Analysis (VDA) paradigm. Two VDA-based methods for such problem solving — NORClass and STEPCLASS — are outlined. The STEPCLASS method is initially designed for the problem with nonordered values of attributes. The main idea of NORClass is based on the assumption that a domain expert is able to order the values of any attribute according to their typicality for each class differently and independently of the values of other attributes. We propose to integrate into the STEPCLASS method the main ideas from NORClass. It is shown that such integration allows increasing the efficiency of the STEPCLASS method in cases, where the above assumption is true, and to overcome some drawbacks of NORClass.