Estimation, modeling, and aggregation of missing survey data for prioritizing customer voices

It is widely acknowledged that understanding and prioritizing the voice of customer is a critical step in new product development. In this work, we propose a novel approach to handle missing and incomplete data while combining information from different surveys for prioritizing customer voices. Our new approach comprises of the following stages: estimating and representing missing and incomplete data; estimating intervals for the criteria used in analyzing data; mapping data on criteria to a common scale; modeling interval data using interval belief structure; and aggregating evidence and ranking customer voices using the interval evidential reasoning algorithm. We demonstrate our approach using a case study from automotive domain with a given criteria hierarchy for analyzing data from three different surveys. We propose new optimization formulations for estimating intervals of the criteria used in our case study and logical yet pragmatic transformation functions for mapping criteria values to a common scale. © 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.