Construction of aggregation functions from data using linear programming

This article examines the construction of aggregation functions from data by minimizing the least absolute deviation criterion. We formulate various instances of such problems as linear programming problems. We consider the cases in which the data are provided as intervals, and the Outputs ordering needs to be preserved, and show that linear programming formulation is valid for Such cases. This feature is very valuable in practice, since the standard simplex method call be Used. (C) 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.