Choquet integral-based hierarchical networks for evaluating customer service perceptions on fast food stores

It is known that a hierarchical decision structure consisting of multiple criteria can be modeled by a Choquet integral-based hierarchical network. With a given input–output dataset, the degree of importance of each criterion can be directly obtained from the corresponding connection weight after the network has been trained from samples. Since each output value or the synthetic evaluation of an alternative derived from uncertain assessments has its upper and lower bounds, the degree of importance of each criterion should not be unique and can be distributed in a range. In this paper, the range of the degree of importance of each criterion is obtained by three Choquet integral-based hierarchical networks with the prespecified hierarchical structure: one is a common network constructed by merely minimizing the least squared error, and the others are employed to determine a nonlinear interval regression model. The above three networks are trained with a given input–output dataset using the proposed genetic algorithm-based learning algorithm. Empirical results of evaluating customer service perceptions on fast food stores demonstrate that the proposed method can identify key factors that have stronger effect on service quality perceptions by employing three Choquet integral-based hierarchical networks with the hierarchical structure to determine possible ranges of the degree of importance of respective aspects and attributes. 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.