{"status":"ok","message-type":"work","message-version":"1.0.0","message":{"indexed":{"date-parts":[[2025,12,30]],"date-time":"2025-12-30T17:49:46Z","timestamp":1767116986522,"version":"build-2065373602"},"reference-count":36,"publisher":"MDPI AG","issue":"6","license":[{"start":{"date-parts":[[2022,6,7]],"date-time":"2022-06-07T00:00:00Z","timestamp":1654560000000},"content-version":"vor","delay-in-days":0,"URL":"https:\/\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by\/4.0\/"}],"funder":[{"name":"the Slovenian Research Agency (ARRS)","award":["P2-0103 (B)","C3330-17-529020"],"award-info":[{"award-number":["P2-0103 (B)","C3330-17-529020"]}]},{"name":"the Slovenian Ministry of Education, Science and Sport","award":["P2-0103 (B)","C3330-17-529020"],"award-info":[{"award-number":["P2-0103 (B)","C3330-17-529020"]}]}],"content-domain":{"domain":[],"crossmark-restriction":false},"short-container-title":["Algorithms"],"abstract":"<jats:p>Multi-attribute decision analysis is an approach to decision support in which decision alternatives are evaluated by multi-criteria models. An advanced feature of decision support models is the possibility to search for new alternatives that satisfy certain conditions. This task is important for practical decision support; however, the related work on generating alternatives for qualitative multi-attribute decision models is quite scarce. In this paper, we introduce Bayesian Alternative Generator for Decision Support Models (BAG-DSM), a method to address the problem of generating alternatives. More specifically, given a multi-attribute hierarchical model and an alternative representing the initial state, the goal is to generate alternatives that demand the least change in the provided alternative to obtain a desirable outcome. The brute force approach has exponential time complexity and has prohibitively long execution times, even for moderately sized models. BAG-DSM avoids these problems by using a Bayesian optimization approach adapted to qualitative DEX models. BAG-DSM was extensively evaluated and compared to a baseline method on 43 different DEX decision models with varying complexity, e.g., different depth and attribute importance. The comparison was performed with respect to: the time to obtain the first appropriate alternative, the number of generated alternatives, and the number of attribute changes required to reach the generated alternatives. BAG-DSM outperforms the baseline in all of the experiments by a large margin. Additionally, the evaluation confirms BAG-DSM\u2019s suitability for the task, i.e., on average, it generates at least one appropriate alternative within two seconds. The relation between the depth of the multi-attribute hierarchical models\u2014a parameter that increases the search space exponentially\u2014and the time to obtaining the first appropriate alternative was linear and not exponential, by which BAG-DSM\u2019s scalability is empirically confirmed.<\/jats:p>","DOI":"10.3390\/a15060197","type":"journal-article","created":{"date-parts":[[2022,6,9]],"date-time":"2022-06-09T09:59:38Z","timestamp":1654768778000},"page":"197","update-policy":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.3390\/mdpi_crossmark_policy","source":"Crossref","is-referenced-by-count":3,"title":["BAG-DSM: A Method for Generating Alternatives for Hierarchical Multi-Attribute Decision Models Using Bayesian Optimization"],"prefix":"10.3390","volume":"15","author":[{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0002-1220-7418","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Martin","family":"Gjoreski","sequence":"first","affiliation":[{"name":"Faculty of Informatics, Universit\u00e0 della Svizzera Italiana (USI), Via Giuseppe Buffi 13, CH-6900 Lugano, Switzerland"}]},{"given":"Vladimir","family":"Kuzmanovski","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Department of Computer Science, Aalto University, FI-00076 Aalto, Finland"}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0003-4317-2833","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Marko","family":"Bohanec","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Department of Knowledge Technologies, Jo\u017eef Stefan Institute, Jamova Cesta 39, SI-1000 Ljubljana, Slovenia"}]}],"member":"1968","published-online":{"date-parts":[[2022,6,7]]},"reference":[{"key":"ref_1","unstructured":"Power, D.J. 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