A multi-criteria assessment of decision support systems in educational environments

Abstract

Decision support systems (DSS) are useful business intelligence (BI) tools as they help managers in large organizations make the best out of many decisions. Decisions are based on various types of raw data, models, documents, knowledge, and past experiences. This paper examines numerous criteria of decision support systems in the educational environment. Two effective methods were discovered and applied in this research, the analytic hierarchy process (AHP) and simple multi-attribute rating technique (SMART). These methods were selected due to their abilities to deal with complex decisional environments in general and widely used in practice for the educational environment in specific. The performance of methods is compared using two datasets called xApi-Education and IPEDS datasets. The obtained results based on the measurement of space complexity showed the level of convergence and similarity between these two methods. However, the experiments show that the simple multi-attribute rating technique outperformed the analytic hierarchy process in terms of accuracy, deviation, and time complexity measurement.