In recent decades, multi-criteria methods have been increasingly used for the quantitative
assessment of the development of socioeconomic systems. Their essence lies in weighted
indicators, i.e., combining the values multiplied by the weights into one summarizing
index. However, determining the significance of indicators is important in such approaches.
It can be done in one or two stages. In the first case, the significance is assessed
immediately, in the second case, the importance ranks of the indicators are determined
before the assessment. Today, most people are satisfied with the first method, i.e.,
determining significance without knowing the importance ranks. This makes sense when
the number of indicators is small. Socio-economic phenomena are, by their nature,
complex and multifaceted, so in practice they manifest in many aspects. Therefore,
their condition can be adequately assessed only with a large number of indicators.
The significance of the indicators of such systems is assessed by comparing the importance
of paired indicators. However, in the presence of a large number of indicators, there
are constantly recurring problems - excessive volumes of expert evaluations and, as
a result, a decrease in the adequacy of the evaluation. Transitive analysis of index
importance (TAII) is the proposed methodology that allows to significantly increase
the number of evaluated indicators while reducing the volume of expert evaluations
and increasing their adequacy. This can be achieved by integrating their transitivity
as a property into the ranking procedure of determining the importance of indicators.
In this way, the volume of expert evaluations can be reduced by 40%. The suitability
of the proposed methodology has been verified using real problems.
