Classification of vulnerable areas using Dominance-based Rough Set Approach

The purpose of this paper is to present a multicriteria methodology with spatial visualization, in order to identify most vulnerable areas regarding violence. We used Dominance-based Rough Set Approach to aggregate social, economic, and demographic characteristics, as well to include the preferences of a decision maker. Among the multicriteria methods, this one has the advantage of do not require the establishment of parameters, such as weights and thresholds. The decision maker only needs to choose a set of reference examples that represents his opinion toward the problem. This method applies decision rules to classify the set of alternatives. In this paper, this methodology was used aiming to classify the census tracts of a city in relation to the vulnerability to homicide. The result is a classification of all 1,854 census tracts of the city of Recife (Brazil) into five vulnerability levels. Based on this application, we can conclude, therefore, that this method may be useful to define where public policies should be allocated, when it is concerned with reduction of violence.