Evaluating multiple attribute items using queries

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Abstract
The task of evaluating and ranking items with multiple-attributes appears in many guises in commerce. Examples include evaluating responses to a request for quotes (RFQ) for some item and comparison shopping for an item within one or more catalogs. This task is straightforward if the value of the item can be explicitly specified by the evaluator as a function of the attribute values. However, a typical evaluator may not be able to provide the value function in explicit form. In contrast, it is intuitive for them to compare, say, two items and pick the preferable one based on all of the relevant attributes. In this paper we present a method, Q-Eval, that queries the evaluator with selected pairs of items and uses the responses to build a preference model for the evaluator. This model is then used to rank the items in order of the inferred preference. The evaluator can then pick the winning item or items by considering only the top few items in this ranked list. This should result in significant productivity improvement for the evaluator when the number of items to choose from is large. Our algorithm is novel in the way it attempts to derive a stable preference model with only a small number of user queries. This paper describes the algorithm and presents experimental results with real-life data to validate the approach.