Importance weighted OWA aggregation of multicriteria queries

The family of ordered weighted averaging (OWA) operators, as introduced by R.R. Yager (1988), appears to be very useful in flexible query answering, including information retrieval, where the information needs are often modeled by an aggregation (of the criteria in the query) between /spl and/ (pure AND) and V (pure OR). In this paper, we discuss and set up a general set of requirements for importance-weighted aggregation, and show that an importance weighting scheme suggested by Yager (1977) for OWA operators satisfies the requirements. The weighted arithmetic mean is shown to be order-equivalent to the special case of importance-weighted OWA operators where the importance-weighted satisfaction of the criteria are weighted evenly in the OWA aggregation.