Preprint
Article
Weighting the Key Features Affecting Supplier Selection using Machine Learning Techniques
This version is not peer-reviewed.
Submitted:
10 December 2019
Posted:
11 December 2019
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Abstract
Supplier selection is an important part of supply chain management (SCM) for any organisation to achieve their objectives. The problem has attracted great interest from academics and practitioners. The selection process starts with determining the most important criteria out of a wide range. Many academic researchers apply multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) techniques for supplier selection. However, the complexity of such approaches may increase significantly, especially when considering a large number of suppliers and selection criteria. This paper proposes an integrated approach combining machine learning classification with the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) to select and evaluate the most suitable supplier. A Decision Tree (DT) classifier is used to select the most important criteria, instead of applying AHP on the complete set of criteria. The applicability of the approach is demonstrated using data from Libyan companies. Results show that decision trees can successfully lead to a most important subset of selection criteria, which would lead to a less complex application of AHP.
Keywords:
supplier selection
; machine learning
; decision tree
Copyright: This open access article is published under a Creative Commons CC BY 4.0 license, which permit the free download, distribution, and reuse, provided that the author and preprint are cited in any reuse.
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