A Dynamic Hybrid Weighting Framework for Teaching Effectiveness Evaluation in Multi-Criteria Decision-Making: Integrating Interval-Valued Intuitionistic Fuzzy AHP and Entropy Triggering

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new method for evaluating teaching effectiveness by combining fuzzy logic and entropy to handle uncertainty and changing data in decision-making.

Contribution

The novel contribution is a dynamic hybrid weighting framework integrating IVIF-AHP with entropy triggering for adaptive MCDM.

Findings

The framework effectively handles expert hesitation and dynamic weight adjustments in complex evaluations.

It improves diagnostic resolution and decision stability compared to traditional methods.

The approach shows strong potential for application in other complex decision-support systems.

Abstract

Multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) problems in complex evaluation systems are often characterized by high uncertainty in expert judgments and dynamic variations in indicator importance. Traditional analytic hierarchy process (AHP) and entropy-based weighting methods typically suffer from two inherent limitations: the inability to explicitly quantify expert hesitation and the rigidity of static weight assignment under evolving data distributions. To address these challenges, this paper proposes a dynamic hybrid weighting framework that integrates an interval-valued intuitionistic fuzzy analytic hierarchy process (IVIF-AHP) with an entropy-triggered correction mechanism. First, interval-valued intuitionistic fuzzy numbers are employed to simultaneously model membership, non-membership, and hesitation degrees in pairwise comparisons, enabling a more comprehensive representation of expert uncertainty. Second, an entropy-triggered dynamic fusion strategy is developed by jointly incorporating information entropy and coefficient of variation, allowing adaptive adjustment between subjective expert weights and objective data-driven weights. This mechanism effectively enhances sensitivity to high-dispersion criteria while preserving expert knowledge in low-variability indicators. The proposed framework is formulated in a hierarchical fuzzy decision structure and implemented through a fuzzy comprehensive evaluation process. Its feasibility and robustness are validated through a concrete case study on teaching effectiveness evaluation for a university engineering course, leveraging multi-source data. Comparative analysis demonstrates that the proposed approach effectively mitigates the weight rigidity and evaluation inflation observed in conventional methods. Furthermore, it improves diagnostic resolution and decision stability across different evaluation periods. The results indicate that the proposed entropy-triggered IVIF-AHP framework provides a mathematically sound and practically applicable solution for dynamic MCDM problems under uncertainty, with strong potential for extension to other complex evaluation and decision-support systems.

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