Multi-criteria three-way decisions considering requirements and targets based on qualitative and quantitative information

In this paper, a novel multi-criteria three-way decision (TWD) method is devised to solve the problems of classification and sorting by considering requirements and targets based on qualitative and quantitative information. TWD theory has been generally utilized to handle multi-criteria decision-making problems. However, few studies on the TWD theory consider the requirements and targets of decision-makers. To fill this gap in the existing studies on the TWD theory, the conditional probability is computed based on the fuzzy axiomatic design and the target-based aggregation operator. A parameter is designed to reflect the preference degree of the basic requirements over the target values offered by the decision-maker. To meet the description needs of quantitative and qualitative attributes, the real numbers and the interval numbers are employed to describe the quantitative information, the interval-valued double hierarchy linguistic term sets are employed to express the qualitative information. The analytic hierarchy process method is utilized to calculate the weights of the criteria with interval-valued double hierarchy linguistic information. Following the maximum-utility principle, the classification and ranking of the objects are attained. Ultimately, a case study on the selection of algorithm engineers in the recruitment process verifies the practicability and effectiveness of the proposed method, and a comparative analysis with other methods proves the superiority of this method.