Application of correlation test to criteria selection for multi criteria decision making (MCDM) models

Multi criteria decision making (MCDM) models are widely used in selection problems in the literature. In the applications of MCDM approaches, selection criteria are directly taken and no specific tests are performed to determine their independency or check any other characteristics. Besides having independent criteria, it is especially important to limit the number of criteria to around seven to have a model which is sensitive to changes in the criteria weights. In this study, correlation test is used to obtain an independent set of criteria and reduce the number of criteria to a manageable level. It has been shown in the paper that the obtained set of independent criteria still fully represents the characteristics of the selection problem.