An application of ranking methods: retrieving the importance order of decision factors

* The author was supported by the János Bolyai fellowship of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. Abstract – In this paper we describe a method that returns the order of decision factors using ranking information, which can thus be interpreted as an inverse approach of the well-known Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP). The adoption of the algorithm is conceivable in several fields, especially in those that examine or employ human decision attitudes. The accuracy of the method is investigated using both artificial and real data. In the first case we could reproduce a set of artificially generated importance orders of a fixed number of decision factors with a ninety percent correspondence, while in the second case we demonstrated how the method works when people were asked to rank 100 different sports.