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Bayesian network model for decision problems

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 Intelligent Information Systems
ISBN 978-83-7051-580-5, pages 285–298

Bayesian Network Model for Decision Problems

Karima Sedki1,2 , Véronique Delcroix1,2 , François-Xavier Lepoutre1,2 ,
Emanuel Adam1,2 , Anne-Pascal Maquinghen-Godillon1,2 , and Isabelle Ville3
1
Université Lille Nord de France, F-59000 Lille, France
2
UVHC, LAMIH FRE CNRS 3304, F-59313 Valenciennes, France
3
INSERM, U750-IFR25, CNRS UMR8169, EHESS, Univ Paris Sud, F-94801;
F-94801, Villejuif, France

Abstract
Multi-Criteria Decision Making (M CDM ) methods involve the selection of the
best (adequate) solutions from a set of available alternatives taking into account
multiple, often conflicting, criteria. The aim of this paper is to propose a partic-
ular structure of Bayesian networks to model M CDM problems. The problem
that we address aims to provide assistance to a person to select an appropriate
object among a large set of alternatives. The person and the alternatives are each
characterized by several attributes that influence both the importance of the cri-
teria and the quality of the alternatives according to the criteria. Our framework
is illustrated on a real example which concerns the problem of choosing a manual
wheelchair.
Keywords: bayesian network, multi-criteria, decision making, importance, satis-
faction, person, quality of alternative

1 Introduction
In many situations humans have to make a decision to choose an alternative among
several; think for example of buying a flight ticket, dinner in restaurant, etc.
Some of the major problems in the decision process are that the factors and the
criteria to be considered are multiple, sometimes complex and often conflicting,
and that the number of available alternatives may be too large to be explicitly
handled. The objective of Multi-Criteria Decision Making (M CDM ) Roy (1985);
Roy and Bouyssou (1993); Bouyssou et al. (2006) is to model and solve such
complex decision problems. An M CDM problem can be defined by: a set of
decision alternatives (objects, actions or choice) A={a1 , a2 , ..., an }, a set of criteria
C={c1 , c2 ,..., cm } according to which desirability of an alternative is judged, and
a set of couples (ai , cj ) or cj (ai ) which evaluate an alternative ai for criterion cj .
The objective is to choose the “best” alternative with is often defined as the one
with the highest score (utility).
In this paper, we present a model based on a particular structure of Bayesian
network for modeling MCDM problems. Our objective is to provide assistance to a
person to select an appropriate alternative among a great set of alternatives. The
general idea of the proposed approach is to take into account important pieces of
286 Karima Sedki et al.

information which are: i) A person’s characteristics who is concerned by the choice

(for example age, professional situation, etc.), ii) the characteristics of available
alternatives (for example T ransportM ode which can include taxi, bus and train
for a transport problem), iii) the importance of each criterion which is defined
from what is known about the person, iv) the index (valuation) of each criterion
which is defined regarding each alternative and v) the satisfaction of the person
concerning a given alternative for each criterion. The satisfaction depends on the
importance and the index of this criterion The criteria are considered dependent
since they have some characteristics of the alternatives in common.
Bayesian networks (BN) Jensen (1996); Pearl (1988); Adnan (2009) are a pow-
erful technique for knowledge representation and reasoning under uncertainty. In
our framework, considered informations (a person’s characteristics, alternatives,
criteria) are treated as random variables and represented as nodes in the con-
structed BN. Influence relations among these nodes are qualitatively modeled by
the link in the BN and quantitatively by conditional probability tables (CP T ). To
solve any multi-criteria decision problem modeled using our framework, we first
consider information related to the concerned problem to construct a bayesian net-
work. We then apply our algorithm which involves several probabilistic inference
in the Bayesian networks.
The paper is organized as follows: In Section 2, we present our framework.
Section 3 gives a real example which concerns the problem of choosing a manual
wheelchair. Section 4 concludes the paper.

2 Proposed framework based on Bayesian networks

Our model is based on Bayesian networks (BN) (cf. Jensen, 1996; Pearl, 1988;
Adnan, 2009). It concerns the conception of a particular structure of BN which
allows the representation of the basic components (the person’s characteristics,
alternatives, criteria, relationships, etc.) and provides mechanisms for decision
making based on this representation.
A natural question is why not using influence Diagram? An influence diagram is
a Bayesian network extended with utility functions and with variables representing
decisions (see Oliver and Smith, 1990). It was originally a compact representation
of a decision tree. We answer this question in the discussion, at the end of the
paper. First, we start with a definition of the concepts used in the rest of the
paper.

2.1 Definition of basic concepts

Person: represents the person concerned by the choice (an individual or a cor-
poration as a company, hospital or university). We denote C P erson = {C1P erson ,
C2P erson , . . . CpP erson } the set of characteristics of the person.
Alternative: refers to the entity of choice: an object, an action. We sometimes
use the term “object” instead of “alternative”. C Alternative = {C1Alternative ,
C2Alternative , . . . CqAlternative } denotes the set of characteristics that identify a
given alternative.
Bayesian Network Model for Decision Problems 287

Characteristics: concern the parameters (or attributes) that identify the person
or alternatives which are considered in the decision process. The characteristics
to be considered depend on the concerned decision problem.
Criteria: they are the specific elements that we consider to determine the de-
sirability of each alternative. The set C = {c1 , c2 , . . . cm } denotes the set of
criteria.
Index: For each criterion, we associate an index which is a numerical function
on the set of alternatives. The index of a criterion for a given alternative
represents the quality of this alternative regarding this criterion. Each index
depends on a subset of characteristics of alternatives.
An alternative is well characterized by its characteristics’ values. However, any
combination of characteristics’ values does not specify an alternative. For example,
assume that for the transport problem, there are two characteristics: Country ∈
{Italy,China,N ewZealand} and T ransportM ode ∈ {Train,Car,Plane}. It is clear
that the combination (N ewZeland,Car) does not represent a possible alternative.
In this sense, we define the following concepts:
Real alternative: Concerns the alternatives that can be chosen (possible choices).
They can be saved in a database. In the previous example, the combination
(N ewZeland, Car) does not constitute a real alternative.
Silhouette of choice: It is obtained by performing inference in the model (i.e
the constructed Bayesian network) from the known characteristics of the per-
son. So, each characteristic of alternatives is associated with a probability
distribution. The combination of characteristics’ values which have highest
probabilities in the silhouette of choice represents an Ideal alternative. It is
possible that the ideal alternative does not exist among the set of possible
alternatives, namely there is no real alternative corresponding to this ideal
alternative. An Example of silhouette of choice is given in Table 1.

Characteristics of alternatives Probability distribution

Country Italy 0.6
China 0.3
NewZeland 0.1
T ransportMode Train 0.2
Car 0.05
Plane 0.75

Table 1: Example of silhouette of choice

If the alternative (Italy, P lane) exists, it is an ideal alternative for the person
concerned by the choice.

2.2 Structure of Bayesian network associated with one criterion

The structure of our model is composed of three variable types which respectively
represent the person, the alternatives and the criteria. Each variable is represented
by a graph node and each criterion is formalized by three nodes in the graph. This
step requires interaction with decision makers and other domain experts to ensure
a good network structure. The nodes are described in the following:
288 Karima Sedki et al.

The node importance of a criterion (Imp(c)) represents the importance of

the criterion c with respect to some characteristics of the person.
The node criterion index (Index(c)) allows to evaluate an alternative accord-
ing to the criterion c. It depends on some characteristics of alternatives.
The node criterion satisfaction (Sat(c)) reflects the satisfaction of the per-
son for a given alternative regarding this criterion. This node depends on the
importance and index nodes.
Figure 1 illustrates the simplified structure of our model based on Bayesian network
associated with one criterion.

Figure 1: The Bayesian network graph representing one decision criterion.

2.3 Parameters of the Bayesian network

The parameters of our Bayesian network concern the definition of conditional
probabilities of the variables importance, index and satisfaction of each criterion.
These variables are evaluated1 on the interval [0,1] as shown in Table 2. The values
of the node importance and index is used to compute the satisfaction.

Evaluation Importance Satisfaction Index

0 - 0.2 indifferent very bad very bad
0.2 - 0.4 not important bad bad
0.4 - 0.6 middle interest medium medium
0.6 - 0.8 important good good
0.8 - 1 very important very good very good

Table 2: Meaning of the values of importance, satisfaction and index of a given criterion

The importance of a criterion depends on some attributes of the person. For

example, the criterion stability of a manual wheelchair is very important for the
person who has amputated legs. Whereas, the criterion comfort of loading the
wheelchair into the car is set to “indifferent” for someone who does not leave
his/her home. That is to say that the system deducts from some person’s char-
acteristics that the value of this importance is 0.1 (or any value in [0, 0.2]). The
index of a criterion depends on some attributes of the alternatives. The definition
1 Numerical functions are defined in order to compute these values.
Bayesian Network Model for Decision Problems 289

of these two variables requires the intervention of domain experts. The variable
satisfaction of a criterion is to maximize. It reflects the satisfaction of the person
for a given alternative regarding a criterion. The satisfaction variable for each
criteria c can be defined by the following function:
Sat(c) = Index(c)Imp(c) (1)

Figure 2: The satisfaction in function of the index and the importance.

This function has been chosen since it presents the following characteristics
(cf. figure 2): (1) if a given criterion is indifferent for the person, she/he will be
satisfied for this criterion whatever the index of a given alternative. This means
that if the importance is close to 0, the satisfaction is close to 1; (2) if the alternative
presents a good index for a given criterion, the person will be satisfied whatever
the importance of this alternative for this criterion. Namely, if the index is close
to 1, the satisfaction is close to 1; (3) whatever the degree of importance of a
criterion, the higher is the index, the higher is the satisfaction, but the lower is
the importance, the more easily the person will be satisfied. This function is used
to generate the conditional probability table for satisfaction variable 2 .
The graph of the BN may include arcs between several characteristics of the
person, for example knowing the size of the person gives an idea on the length of
its legs. The same is true between attributes of the alternative.
The model may also include direct arcs from a characteristic of the person
to a characteristic of the alternative to represent a constraint such as “the total
width of the FRM must be less than the width of the smallest passage used by
the person”.
The complete model is built from the association of all the Bayesian networks
(BN) associated with each criterion represented in Figure 1. The association con-
sists simply to identify all common variables between these BN. An example of a
complete model for choosing a manual wheelchair is given in Section 3.

2.4 Reasoning mechanisms for decision making: Provided algorithm

Bayesian networks are powerful models for knowledge representation and reasoning
under uncertainty. Several algorithms have been developed for inference with BN,
2 We have used Netica software to build the model and generate automatically the CP T
(Conditional Probabilities Tables).
290 Karima Sedki et al.

especially those whose objective is to compute the posterior probabilities of hidden

variables given the variables that have observed values. Our algorithm is divided
into four steps. Three of these steps require inference in the model.

2.4.1 Step 1: Determine the importance of each criterion.

Given the person’s characteristics who is concerned by the choice (for example
age, professional situation), it is interesting to determine the importance of each
criterion. This can be performed in two ways: either by using the experts’ knowl-
edge included in the model (knowledge that is extracted during the definition of
the structure and parameters of the BN), in this case, it is enough to ask the per-
son about his/her characteristics and introduce them into the BN to obtain the
importance of each criterion (this is a straightforward inference in the constructed
BN), we note that generally in this case, we define a numerical functions which
take into account the person’s characteristics that influence on the concerned cri-
teria; or by manually entering the importance of each criterion in the network in
some particular cases or easy situations (for example criteria that depend only of
few person’s characteristics). These two ways can be combined and used succes-
sively: after interviewing the person and entering some of his/her characteristics,
the decision maker can perform the first inference to obtain the importance of
each criterion. He can then manually modify the importance of a criterion that
he judges are improperly evaluated, according to his experience and the person he
helps to choose. See the example in Section 3 for more clarification.
P erson
Formally, the objective of this step is to compute P (Imp(ci )|Cobs ) for all
P erson
criteria ci where Cobs is the subset of the person’s characteristics that are
observed.

2.4.2 Step 2: Define the silhouette of choice.

The objective of this step is to obtain the posterior probability distribution for
each characteristic of alternatives. This step can be viewed as a recommendation
for each characteristic of alternatives (see Table 1 for an example of silhouette of
choice). The silhouette of choice is obtained by updating the characteristics’ prob-
abilities of alternatives from two pieces of information: the importance of criteria
is defined in step 1, and the satisfaction of criteria which are fixed to the “very
important” value, i.e the interval [0.8,1]. This inference determines the charac-
teristics’ values that are most compatible with a high value of the satisfaction
variables. We not that there are links between some characteristics of the alter-
natives and the criteria, this means that for each criterion we have the preferred
characteristics of the alternatives. It is to precise that the silhouette of choice does
not directly determine the best alternative. But having the probability distribu-
tion for each characteristic, facilitates the choice of the best alternative. The ideal
alternative is obtained by considering for each characteristic of alternative, the
value having the greatest probability in the silhouette of choice. Unfortunately, it
is possible that this alternative does not exist in the set of real alternatives. If it
exists, we choose the ideal alternative (and step 3 can be skipped). In the case
where the ideal alternative does not exist, step 3 allows to determine the best real
alternative from the silhouette of choice. Formally, the objective of this step is to
Bayesian Network Model for Decision Problems 291

compute the probabilities P (CjAlternative |Imp(c1 ), Sat(c1 ), . . . , Imp(cm ), Sat(cm ))

for all characteristics of the alternative.

2.4.3 Step 3: Determine the real alternative.

Computing a distance between a real alternative and a silhouette of choice allows
to find the best real alternative. We choose among all the real alternatives, the
one that is closest to the silhouette of choice defined in step 2. The distance
(DS (Alternative)) between a given alternative and the silhouette of choice S is
computed using the following equation:
Pq
(1 − P (CiS = CiAlternative ))
DS (Alternative) = i=1 (2)
q

Recall that CiAlternative represents the ith characteristic of a given alternative (q

is the total number of characteristics of alternatives). C S = {C1S , C2S , . . . CqS } is the
set of characteristics of the silhouette of choice.
Exemple 1 Assume that we consider the silhouette of choice given in Table 1
to compute the distance of available alternatives. The ideal alternative relative to
this silhouette of choice is AI,P = (Italy, P lane); we have P (Italy) = 0.6 and
P (P lane) = 0.75 (highest probabilities). If it does not exist (i.e there is no such
combination in the set of possible alternatives) and if AC,P and AI,T are two real
alternatives. Then, the choice concerns these two real alternatives. We have:
DS (AI,P ) = (1−P (Country=Italy))+(1−P
2
(T ransp=P lane))
= 0.4+0.25
2 = 0.325
(1−P (Country=China))+(1−P (T ransp=P lane)) 0.7+0.25
DS (AC,P ) = 2 = 2 = 0.475
(1−P (Country=Italy))+(1−P (T ransp=T rain)) 0.4+0.8
DS (AI,T ) = 2 = 2 = 0.6
We choose the real alternative the closest to the silhouette of choice, namely the
alternative that has the smallest distance. In this example, the best alternative
is AC,P (AI,P has a smallest distance, but it does not exist in the set of possible
alternatives).
At this level (step 3), the real alternative that is selected represents the best
compromise in terms of satisfaction of the different criteria, taking into account
the importance of each criterion. The last step aims to compute the satisfaction
of each criterion, for the alternative selected in step 3.

2.4.4 Step 4: Determine the satisfaction of the selected alternative.

This step requires another inference in the BN to compute the satisfaction of each
criterion with respect to the person’s characteristics and those of the selected al-
ternative. We enter into the BN the characteristics’ values of the real alternative
obtained in step 3 (the person’s characteristics are already entered). However, we
must remove the evidence of the nodes satisfaction that are fixed at step 2 since
these nodes become the target of inference. This allows to obtain a measure of
the satisfaction of the person for this alternative regarding each criterion. This
measure can be obtained for any real alternative, for a given person. It is suffi-
cient to enter in the BN the characteristics of the person and the alternative and
292 Karima Sedki et al.

then perform inference to get the satisfaction of the criteria. Formally, the objec-
P erson
tive of this step is to compute the probabilities P (Sat(ci )|Cobs , C Alternative ) for
P erson
each criterion ci where Cobs is the sub-set of person’s characteristics that are
observed.

3 Example: problem of choosing a Manual Wheelchair

To illustrate our approach, we are interested in the problem of choosing a manual
wheelchair (MWC) which is a complicated MCDM problem. This work is sup-
ported by the National Project SACR-FRM. This problem includes more than
dozen criteria: comfort rest, comfort of loading in car, comfort of transfer propul-
sion, price, strength, stability, maneuverability, accessibility, etc. The number of
the person’s characteristics that can be considered is between 60 and 300 and those
of the MWC are about 150. We present here a part of the model for only three
criteria:
Comfort rest: Concerns the discomfort and long term pain when the person is
at rest in his/her chair, either she is inactive or she/he watches television.
Comfort of loading in car: This criterion concerns the risks of getting hurt by
loading the MWC in a car.
Maneuverability: concerns the quality of the MWC to be easily propelled in
crowded environment (corridor, elevator, parking, etc.). The person can propel
herself/himself or be pushed by somebody else.
The model is presented in figure 3 (we have used Netica software Norsys (1998)
to build the model). The person’s characteristics are presented on the left of
the graph and those of the MWC are presented on the right side. The nine
central nodes displayed with detailed probabilities correspond to the importance,
satisfaction and index associated with the three considered criteria.
The values of the variables can be numerical or symbolic, discrete or continuous.
A numeric value can be associated with a symbolic value, for example, the variable
( Who load the MWC in car) has three values (User’s of MWC, Senior assistant,
Young assistant ), where each value is respectively associated to [1, 0.8, 0.3]. These
numerical values are then used in the function that defines the importance of the
criterion Comfort of loading the MWC in car (ImportanceCLC ):
ImportanceCLC = F requencyLoading×
(0.5 × W hoLoadT heM W C + 0.5 × T ypeLoadM W CinCar)

The table of conditional probabilities of the node ImportanceCLC is computed

using this function.
We present a use case, without detailing all the variables that the model con-
tains. The person concerning by the choice is an active young man who moves
independently with his MWC (self-propelled). This person moves regularly by car
and loads himself the MWC in the car; he has a small car which is impractical for
loading the MWC.
The first inference in the BN (step 1 of the algorithm) determines the im-
portance of each criterion for this person. The person’s characteristics are the
Bayesian Network Model for Decision Problems 293

Figure 3: The graph of a Bayesian network for choosing a manual wheelchair regarding
three criteria.

observed variables and the nodes importance are the target ones. The result of
the first inference (see Figure 4) shows that the most important criterion for this
person is the maneuverability of the MWC, which is explained by his active profile.
Whereas, the comfort of rest is considered irrelevant for him. Indeed, these two
criteria are usually conflicting. The comfort of loading the MWC in car is consid-
ered as relatively important for this person because he loads himself the MWC in
a small car.
The next step allows to obtain a silhouette of choice. Hence, we perform a
second inference after having fixed the values of the satisfaction nodes to their
maximals values (i.e the satisfaction of each criterion is very important). This
provides a probability distribution for characteristics of the MWC which are tar-
get nodes. We can observe that several variables have a preferred value, namely
with a high probability. For example, it is recommended for this person to
choose an MWC with a folding frame and removable brackets (in Figure 5, we
have P (T ypeF rame=F olding)=0.559 and P (RemovableBrackets=Y es)=0.757).
Theses values induce a good index of the criterion CLC (see Figure 5). Recall
that to maximize the satisfaction when the importance is high, it is necessary that
the index will be relatively good. This is observed on the Figure 5.
The third step consists to choose the best real MWC from the silhouette of
choice. Considering only characteristics that affect the three treated criteria, there
exists effectively an MWC where values of these characteristics correspond to those
294 Karima Sedki et al.

Figure 4: Result of the first inference: importance of criteria for the person.

indicated by the silhouette of choice (highest probability for each characteristic).

It is therefore unnecessary to compute the distances between the MWC of the
database and the silhouette of choice. In this example, the MWC finally selected
by the algorithm is the ideal MWC.
The last step aims to measure the satisfaction of the person for the selected real
MWC. Hence, we perform a last inference in the BN after entering the character-
istics of the selected MWC. In this example, the ideal MWC provides a maximal
satisfaction for the three criteria. This is not generally the case when all criteria
are taken into account.
It is important to note that the definition of the model is a crucial and difficult
step because it requires various experts’ knowledge and interaction with the de-
cision maker and other domain experts. It is important to consider only relevant
variables, to properly evaluate the importance of each criterion with respect to the
person and the index of each criterion regarding the alternatives. Once the model
is well defined, it is easy to use it.

4 Discussion and Conclusion

4.1 Discussion
A natural question about this proposition is why not using influence Diagram? In-
fluence diagrams include decision and utility nodes. There are several objections
to the use of such a model with the kind of structure we propose. The first one
Bayesian Network Model for Decision Problems 295

Figure 5: Result of the second inference: silhouette of choice.

concerns the decision nodes. In case several decisions are considered, this model
deals with a sequence of decisions. In our proposition, the decision concerns the
attributes of the alternatives. In that representation, each attribute of the alterna-
tive could be considered as a decision, but they do not constitute a chronological
sequence. For example, while choosing a MWC, the order of the characteristics of
the MWC considered by the specialist who helps the person to choose is highly
dependent of the specialist. Determining a sequence of the characteristics of the
alternative is not feasible. In order to consider a single decision as “the choice of
an alternative”, it would be necessary to add a node “FRM” (or “alternative”) as
a parent of all the attributes of the alternatives, whose values are the list of real
MWC. In that eventuality, the definition of this node and of all its children should
be updated to take into account each new real alternative. On the contrary, the
model that we propose is not dependent of the set of real alternatives. It only
depends of the list of attributes that must be taken in account. The same kind of
representation is choosen in Fenton and Neil (2001) that also deals with MCDM
problem. The authors use a BN, and not an ID, in which the decision noded (such
as “mode of transport” or “start time” in a travel example) are represented by
chance node.
296 Karima Sedki et al.

Another remark about influence diagram concerns the nodes of utility. There
is no probability on these nodes. A utility function is supposed to be known with
certainty. In our model, the importance and index nodes can be either determinis-
tic or probabilistic. That is to say that our model can manage uncertainty on the
quality of alternatives for a criteria, and also the uncertainty on the importance
of a criteria for a person. The distinction between certain and uncertain criteria
is explained in Fenton and Neil (2001). In their proposition, the BN only includes
uncertain criteria. Next, a traditionnal MCDM technique is used to combine all
criteria.
Finally, utility nodes does not have children, except another utility function.
But in that case, the inference is not possible. In our proposition, we expect that
the value of the importance influences the index, and thus the characteristics of
the FRM.
Among the well known MCDM methods, one can cite (Cho (2003)) the Analytic
Hierarchy Process (AHP), Bayesian Analysis, multi-attribute utility/value theory,
and Outranking Methods such as ELECTRE Figueira et al. (2005). In those
method, the person concerned by the choice is not really taken in account. This
person can define the pairwise comparison matrix for criteria, but this may be
a difficult task. In some cases, the person is not able to evaluate the relative
importance between two criteria in her/his personal situation. In our method,
the person has to give personal pieces of information, but nothing else. The
knowledge of the experts about the importance of the criteria depending on their
characteristics is include in the BN, both in the structure and in the function of
the nodes of importance.
Another advantage of our method is that it clearly distinguish between the
attributes of the alternative and the criteria. The function used to evaluate the
quality of an alternative regarding a criteria allows a real flexibility with the at-
tributes. For example, it allows to deal with alternatives that do not all have
exactly the same characteristics. In the classical methods mentioned above, the
criteria are directly associated with an attribute of the alternative, or a simple
combination (sum) of some attributes. In the model proposed in Fenton and Neil
(2001), the uncertain criteria are defined by a function of some attributes of the
alternatives. However, the distintion between criterion and attribute is not very
clear (a node such as “start time” seems to be considered as a criteria in some
pages and not in others).
In order to compare the above methods with ours, it would be interesting to
use the BN constructed as explain in the previous section to obtain the index of
each criteria for all the real alternatives. This values, associated with the degrees
of importance of each criterion (step 1 of our proposition), constitute the base
of classical MCDM methods. This approach is very near of the one proposed
by Fenton and Neil (2001). They propose to use a particuler BN to evaluate all
the alternatives on uncertain criteria, before applying a traditional technique to
combine the values of all criteria for each alternative. The fact to evaluate one
by one all the alternatives may be very long if there is a lots of alternatives, since
an inference is needed each time. Our proposition require only three inferences.
Another comparison would be interesting about the method that we propose:
first, use our BN to compute the satisfaction on each criteria, for all the real
Bayesian Network Model for Decision Problems 297

alternative, and next, select the alternative producing the best average satisfaction.
We suppose that this naı̈ve and expensive method would give he same result as
the one we propose, but this is to be proven! This is one of the next step of our
work!

4.2 Conclusion
We have proposed in this paper an M CDM framework based on a Bayesian net-
work and centered on the person. This approach takes into account important
pieces of information for the decision process. These information are related to
the person concerned by the choice regarding his/her characteristics and to the
alternatives described by several parameters. The satisfaction associated to an
alternative is determined jointly by two components: the analysis of the quality of
the alternative for each criterion (i.e index of a criterion) and the analysis of the
level of importance required for each criterion (i.e importance of a criterion). The
proposed method requires three inferences in the Bayesian network: an inference
to compute the importance of the criteria; a second to propose a silhouette of
choice that gives preferred values for each characteristic of the alternatives, via
a probability distribution. The third inference computes the level of satisfaction
for each criterion about the real alternative selected according to the silhouette of
choice. This method allows to obtain directly the best alternative, without having
to evaluate each alternative.
As the number of possible alternatives can be very large (in the case of our
application, the database contains over 400 M W C without forgetting the possible
settings). Several techniques can be exploited to reduce the number of alternatives
to be considered for computing distances. We can, for example, firstly consider
the strong constraints that will discard some alternatives. We can also discard the
real alternatives where the value of one of its characteristics takes zero probability
(or low) in the silhouette of choice.
The proposed method based on Bayesian network has many advantages. The
most important is certainly the fact that we consider the person’s characteristics
concerned by the choice to define importance of the criteria. The part of the
model that concerns the person may be more or less developed according to the
information that we dispose about the person. It is not asked to inform all the
characteristics of the complete model. The information that are not provided
are replaced by prior probabilities. Furthermore, the particular structure of the
proposed model can take into account the very specific criteria, such as the capacity
of disabled people. It is not embarrassing that a criterion concerns only certain
people. It is sufficient to correctly define the importance of this criterion: if the
importance of a criterion is equal to zero for a person, then this means that this
criterion is indifferent to him and will not affect the choice. Another important
point is that dependency between criteria is treated because of some criteria are
some characteristics in common.
Another advantage of this method is that it allows to evaluate the alternatives
for each criterion with respect to the person. This is important because many
M CDA methods require that these evaluation are known with certainty (and re-
gardless of the person). The proposed method allows us to combine many criteria,
 298 Karima Sedki et al.

without a prior definition of their relative importance.

The major inconvenient is that the system is based on a model that can be
difficult to build because it requires a careful analysis of necessary informations.
The Bayesian network structure and its parameters are defined through exchanges
between extensive interaction with the designer and domains experts. However, for
using, it requires little information. In addition to this flexibility of use, the model
can be used in multiple ways, as described in the different steps of the algorithm.
Thus the same model can be used to evaluate the importance of criteria for a
person, can gives a silhouette of choice, or to evaluate an alternative for each
criterion.
A future work aims to evaluate the limitations of this approach concerning
the size of the model and the complexity (inferences in the Bayesian network). It
may be interesting to ask about the distribution of such model: is it relevant to
consider a multi-agent system based on Bayesian networks to address the problem
of multi-criteria decision, for example by distributing one criterion for each agent?

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