Inter Observer Variability Assessment through Ordered Weighted Belief Divergence Measure in MAGDM Application to the Ensemble Classifier Feature Fusion

TL;DR

This paper introduces an evidential multi-attribute group decision-making framework that assesses expert opinion variability and conflicts using belief measures, applied to ensemble classifier feature fusion for retinal disorder diagnosis.

Contribution

It proposes a novel method combining belief divergence measures with group decision-making to handle expert conflicts and uncertainty in ensemble classifier applications.

Findings

Effective assessment of expert opinion variability

Improved decision support in ensemble classifier fusion

Application to retinal disorder diagnosis

Abstract

A large number of multi-attribute group decisionmaking (MAGDM) have been widely introduced to obtain consensus results. However, most of the methodologies ignore the conflict among the experts opinions and only consider equal or variable priorities of them. Therefore, this study aims to propose an Evidential MAGDM method by assessing the inter-observational variability and handling uncertainty that emerges between the experts. The proposed framework has fourfold contributions. First, the basic probability assignment (BPA) generation method is introduced to consider the inherent characteristics of each alternative by computing the degree of belief. Second, the ordered weighted belief and plausibility measure is constructed to capture the overall intrinsic information of the alternative by assessing the inter-observational variability and addressing the conflicts emerging between the group of experts. An ordered weighted belief divergence measure is constructed to acquire the weighted support for each group of experts to obtain the final preference relationship. Finally, we have shown an illustrative example of the proposed Evidential MAGDM framework. Further, we have analyzed the interpretation of Evidential MAGDM in the real-world application for ensemble classifier feature fusion to diagnose retinal disorders using optical coherence tomography images.