Heuristic Rating Estimation Approach to The Pairwise Comparisons Method

TL;DR

This paper introduces an extended Heuristic Ratio Estimation (HRE) method for pairwise comparisons, allowing known weights for some concepts to estimate unknown weights, supported by theoretical analysis and numerical examples.

Contribution

It generalizes the HRE algorithm by incorporating heuristics, enabling more flexible and practical pairwise comparison estimations.

Findings

Extended HRE algorithm with heuristics

Theoretical foundations established

Numerical examples demonstrate practical use

Abstract

The Heuristic Ratio Estimation (HRE) approach proposes a new way of using the pairwise comparisons matrix. It allows the assumption that the weights of some alternatives (herein referred to as concepts) are known and fixed, hence the weight vector needs to be estimated only for the other unknown values. The main purpose of this paper is to extend the previously proposed iterative HRE algorithm and present all the heuristics that create a generalized approach. Theoretical considerations are accompanied by a few numerical examples demonstrating how the selected heuristics can be used in practice.