Approximation and Visualization of Interactive Decision Maps

Short course of lectures

Alexander V. Lotov

Dorodnicyn Computing Center of Russian Academy of Sciences and

Lomonosov Moscow State University

Lecture 9. Application of Pareto frontier visualization in Web and

in e-democracy

Plan of the lecture1) Standard Instruments of E-Democracy2) Democratic paradigm of environmental decision making3) Few words concerning RGM/IDM technique4) Several applications of the RGM/IDM technique on Web

Participatory Decision Support for Integrated River Basin Planning

e-DEMOCRACIA-CM (Madrid community) 5) Modified Pareto frontier visualization: interactive MCO

procedures in Web

E-Governance and E-Democracy

E-Governance

E-DemocracyE-Government

E-Participation E-VotingE-Administration

Standard Instruments of E-Democracy

0 Technical Complexity

Political Process

(iii) Decision

(ii) Formation of opinion

(i) Information acquisition

Infor- Uni- Bi- Trans- mation directional actional

Web-sites

E-Mail Chat

E-Voting

The technocratic and the democratic paradigms of

environmental decision making

The technocratic paradigm of environmental decision making

• The technocratic paradigm is a usual concept of environmental decision making: experts develop a water management project, and professional decision makers approve, conditionally approve with minor changes or reject the project.

Democratic paradigm of environmental decision making

• “… the power to make decisions must be placed as far as possible in the hands of the persons who are the most directly influenced by the decision concerned, and not in the hands of individual decision makers and their experts. The ‘expert-oriented’ paradigm is seen increasingly as counterproductive in this respect” (M.Abbott et al., 1999).

Example of a failure of the technocratic paradigm in the USSR

An illustration of the failure of the technocratic paradigm is can provided by the story of the large-scale water management project based on partial diversion of the flow of Northern Russian rivers into the Volga River basin. In 1981 the USSR communist party has made a decision to approve the project and start its implementation. However, mass protests of environmentalists, researchers, writers and practically all educated people have resulted first in suspension of the project and then in its final stop in 1986.

Informing non-expertsNon-experts usually have minimal knowledge on the

ways, how to solve environmental problems. Nevertheless, they want and often are involved into political actions related to such problems. It is clear that the gap between knowledge and actions of non-experts can be misused by irresponsible politicians and is dangerous.

Internet can help non-experts understand the environmental problems and base their problem-related legal and political actions on such knowledge.

The democratic paradigm requires special tools for

elaboration of information in a form accessible for all people

Internet tools that support the democratic paradigm: possible

requirements

• simplicity

• transparent form

• objectivity of the tools

Objectivity of the tools

“Information must be supplied under the same form for all stakeholders and must be considered by all of them as objective.” (Cunge and Erlich, 1999).

Comment A small list of possible alternatives developed by experts results in an asymmetric relation between experts and non-experts: experts can develop alternatives and non-experts cannot. This asymmetric situation is not equitable, the objectivity principle may be violated. Experts may use it to thrust their preferences on non-

experts, and non-experts understand it.

Once again, decision screening versus final decision making in environmental

problems

We try to make the situation symmetric, i.e. to help non-experts to develop the decision alternatives by themselves on the basis of

graphic exploration of the whole variety of feasible decision alternatives.

An independent search for preferable decision alternatives can make the situation symmetric

and objective. The process of independent decision screening

can be considered as the learning process.

Multi-criteria graphic techniques for decision screening

The main principles of the methodology are:

• Application of a simplified integrated model of a environmental system;

• Application of a multi-criteria decision support tool based on visualization of Pareto frontier

Two main tasks to be solved in the framework of e-participation in

public decision problems

• informing lay stakeholders on public decision problems (especially on possible strategies for solving the problems); and

• supporting the decision making (aggregating stakeholders’ preferences or even negotiations).

INFORMING the lay stakeholders

Web tools based on the IDM technique can help lay stakeholders better understand the feasibility frontiers and express preferences by selecting one or several strategies that best fit their concerns.

It important that it can be done independently of mass media that can help thrusting the strategies selected by an expert on lay stakeholders.

The lay stakeholders can base their problem-related legal and political actions (including e-participation) on such knowledge.

Supporting the decision making

Web applications of the RGM/IDM technique are aimed, first of all, at supporting the first, pre-negotiation phase and arbitration. However, they can be used for supporting negotiations.

Few words on the RGM/IDM technique A database of alternatives in the form of a decision matrix is considered, i.e., table of N decision alternatives (rows) given by a finite number of attributes (columns), a part of

which is used as the selection criteria. One or several preferable alternatives must be selected.

Main features of the problem

The criteria, which used for selecting a small number of alternatives, are assumed to be real values. Thus, an alternative is associated with a criterion point. The method is based on visualization of the Pareto frontier of the “cloud” of criterion points.

The decision maker has to identify the goal on the Pareto frontier of the “cloud”. Such information of the DM’s preferences helps to select a small number of «good» alternatives. This study can be considered as a special form of data mining.

Example: real estate on sale

A simple graphic description of the method

For illustrative purposes, let m=2 (criterion points are displayed in the plane). Non-dominated points are given by crosses.

Enveloping the criterion points

Approximating the Edgeworth-Pareto hull of the convex hull (the so-called CEPH)

Pareto frontier is analyzed by user and a preferred combination of criterion values

(reasonable goal) is identified

The alternatives that are close to the goal are selected

General case (m from 3 to 8)

Visualization of the Pareto frontier

is based on approximation of the CEPH and application of the Interactive Decision Maps technique for the

interactive analysis of the frontiers of the slices.

Several applications (discussed yesterday)

• Selecting a location for rural health practice in Idaho• Application to local water quality planning in Russia

(“Revival of the Volga River” program)• Mexico: APLICACIÓN DE LA MINERÍA DE

DATOS EN LA LOCALIZACIÓN ÓPTIMA DE INSTALACIONES PETROLERAS

• Mexico: Aplicación de la Minería de Datos para la Aplicación de la Minería de Datos para la exploración óptima de reservas petrolerasexploración óptima de reservas petroleras

• Exploration of pollution abatement cost in the Electricity Sector – Israeli case study

Application of RGM/IDM in Web.Reasonable Goals for DataBases

(RGDB)

Concept of the Web RGDB application server

Data input

Example of the RGDB display

Selected alternatives

Web RGDB can be found at

http://www.ccas.ru/mmes/mmeda/rgdb/index.htm

Or

http://www.rgdb.org/idm/

EU Water Framework Directive

Participatory Decision Support for Integrated River Basin Planning

(Funding: German Federal Ministry of Education and Research)

The Web RGDB was used as a part of DSS

developed by

Jörg Dietrich and Andreas H. Schumann,

Ruhr University Bochum,

Institute for Hydrology, Water Management and Environmental Engineering

DSS was calibrated for the Werra River Basin

Weser

Rhein

Ems Elbe

Werra

Dynamically Calculated Decision Matrix

For the Participatory Decision Support System, a special form of the Web RGDB was developed. It can support negotiations. It applies selecting several goals and related

small groups of alternatives.

Presentation of RGM/IDM Results

Architecture of the Web-based DSS

The plan of Werra basin management for the next five years was developed. Unfortunately, ordinary people (lay

stakeholders) were excluded from the decision process.

Next German project started now is related to strategies of water management at the sea shore of Shandong province of China

(Yellow River delta).

Another Project: E-DEMOCRACIA-CM

(Madrid community)

A framework for participatory group decision support using Pareto

frontier visualization, goal identification and arbitration

R. Efremov, D. Rios Insua, A. Lotov

Application of the research is related to participatory budget planning

General public must be allowed to have a word and aid in deciding and

approving how public budgets, mainly in municipalities, are spent.

The study is devoted to developing user-friendly, yet rigorous, Web-based

group decision support methods.

The developed methods are based on interactive Pareto frontier visualization

combined with expression of preferences in terms of goals and using

goal-based arbitration.

A participatory decision making process is divided into two stages:

• At the first stage, instead of providing their value functions, the stakeholders express their preferences via Web in the form of feasible (or reasonable) goals directly on display of the Pareto frontier.

• At the second stage, this preference information is used in an arbitration procedure to construct the group decision.

The IDM technique is used for supporting the stakeholders in identifying

their personal goals.

Since the stakeholders supported by visualizing the Pareto frontier are able to

identify their goals consciously, we assume that such goals are the result of

maximizing the value functions of stakeholders over the Pareto frontier.

Simple-minded arbitration

Preference information provided by stakeholders

a(Y)

y(1)

y1

y2

• The stakeholders identify their reasonable goals

• The weights of Tchebycheff functions are found that result in the identified goals

Goal-based arbitration scheme

a(Y)

y(1)

y1

y2

y(2)

The arbitration scheme is based on averaging the weights of Tchebycheff functions

Using of voting procedures for testing the arbitration rule

a(Y)

y(1)

y2

1

2

2

3

4

56

• Participants receive several

alternatives, which are close

to the goal according to the

Tchebysheff distance; then,

they assign score to the

alternatives

• The lists of alternatives with score are used in voting schemes.

A group decision support tool for selecting a hostel in London town

Criteria :

LocationLocation

SecuritySecurity

PricePrice

CleanlinessCleanliness

Staff (service)Staff (service)

• First stage:1. Every participant uses Web to study the problem alone; he/she obtains the IDM Java applet with the Pareto frontier and specifies the goal;

2. After it, he/she immediately receives a list of about five alternatives that are close to the goal;

3. Participants has to give scores to the alternatives (5 for the best one, 1 for the worst).

• Second stage :1. The scores given by participants are summed up; the alternatives

are ranked in accordance to the sum. 2. The ranked list of alternatives, along with their attributes, is

displayed to the participants during their face-to-face meeting.3. The participants are asked to approve the alternative with the

maximal score as the best one (by voting). If they do not accept such an alternative, the discussion follows and another alternative may be proposed to be voted.

The experiment

Participants: International group of students at faculty for Cybernetics and Computational Mathematics of Lomonosov Moscow State University, consisting of 5 Vietnamese and 18 Russian students. No instructions were given on the decision support method and the Web system before the experiment.

• Main goals of the experiment:

Comparing the results of the arbitration rules with voting procedure.

Studying the users’ feedbacks:

whether this resource and the RGM method are intelligible?

is it worth using this Web resource and additional procedures or it could be

easier to chose a hostel from the table?

Additional information

ResultsThe list of 3 hostels with the maximal scores:

– Admotel – 41 points;– YHA London St. Pauls – 30 points;– International Student hostel – 26 points.

• The results of voting: Admotel is the best.

• Let us compare it with the result of the arbitration procedure

Comparison of arbitration rule and direct voting

• The goal-based arbitration rule gave:

Security Location Price Cleanliness Staff

YHA London St Pauls 83% 91% 18 € 79 % 81%

Note that it was second place in the list of best scored hotels.

Compare it with the voting winner:

Security Location Price Cleanliness Staff

Admotel 86% 93% 18 € 86% 73%

Thus, the arbitration rule turned out to be close to the results of scoring and voting. It makes us hope that a balanced decision in the case of a large number of stakeholders that are not able to

meet can be provided by the arbitration rule.

Experiments with non-mathematicians

• Experiments with karate sportsmen;

• Experiments with orgel musicians;

• Experiments with people that have got various education;

• Experiments with energy engineering students (freshmen)

Easy to use – 40%, not easy to use – 40%

Desirable to use in future – 53%

Application of the arbitration procedure in the case of finite

choice in budget problems(Spain, URJC)

• List of alternative budget allocation decisions was formulated and evaluated against selected attributes;

• Any stakeholder uses the RGDB applet to explore the Pareto frontier of the envelope and to identify his/her individual reasonable goal

• The arbitration reasonable point was found (using the Tchebycheff function with averaged parameters)

• The arbitration point was used for selecting one or several alternatives of budget allocation. In the case of several alternatives, they are ranked in accordance to the nearness to the arbitration point.

Demonstration of the Web resource for selecting a hostel in London

(ask Francesca Pianosi)

Modified Pareto frontier visualization:

interactive MCO procedures in Web

Pareto Step

Pareto Step -2

Pareto Race with Interactive Decision Maps