Analyzing Different Expert-Opined Strategies to Enhance the Effect on the Goal of a Multi-Attribute Decision-Making System Using a Concept of Effort Propagation and Application in Enhancement of High School Students' Performance

In many real-world multi-attribute decision-making (MADM) problems, mining the inter-relationships and possible hierarchical structures among the factors are considered to be one of the primary tasks. But, besides that, one major task is to determine an optimal strategy to work on the factors to enhance the effect on the goal attribute. This paper proposes two such strategies, namely parallel and hierarchical effort assignment, and propagation strategies. The concept of effort propagation through a strategy is formally defined and described in the paper. Both the parallel and hierarchical strategies are divided into sub-strategies based on whether the assignment of efforts to the factors is uniform or depends upon some appropriate heuristics related to the factors in the system. The adapted and discussed heuristics are the relative significance and effort propagability of the factors. The strategies are analyzed for a real-life case study regarding Indian high school administrative factors that play an important role in enhancing students' performance. Total effort propagation of around 7%-15% to the goal is seen across the proposed strategies given a total of 1 unit of effort to the directly accessible factors of the system. A comparative analysis is adapted to determine the optimal strategy among the proposed ones to enhance student performance most effectively. The highest effort propagation achieved in the work is approximately 14.4348%. The analysis in the paper establishes the necessity of research towards the direction of effort propagation analysis in case of decision-making problems.