Patent ID: 7664616

Claim:
An intrinsically valid statistical approach for the analysis of inexact ordinal data having one or more variables and provision of numerical, textual, or graphical results for action by a decision maker, the approach comprising the steps of using a computer system for executing computer software and the computer system storing a computer readable medium to execute the computer software to perform the following steps: (a) partially ordering data by determining for all pairs of data the order of a first datum compared to a second datum as (i) superior, (ii) inferior, (iii) equal, or (iv) undecided, wherein for tuples a partial ordering comprises the first datum to be superior if for each variable the first datum is superior or equal, and for at least one variable, the first datum is superior; (b) factorizing the partially ordered data; (c) generating a representation of pairwise orderings for each variable; (d) recursively combining the representations of pairwise orderings for subsets of variables into a representation of the combined pairwise ordering, the subsets and combining functions based on knowledge about hierarchical relationships between subsets of the variables; (e) generating a score for each datum based on the combined representation of pairwise orderings; (f) estimating an information content for each of the scores; (g) generating a weight for each score based on the information content; (h) aggregating the scores and weights of all data using at least one statistical method for weighted rank scores, wherein the statistical methods are selected from the group comprised of ranking, positioning, comparing, discriminating/regressing, and clustering; and (i) outputting at least one of numerical, textual, and graphical results from the aggregating step (b) for display and review by the decision maker to enable action to be taken by the decision maker as a consequence of the results.