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Tri-level thinking: models of three-way decision

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Abstract

The underlying philosophy of three-way decision is thinking in threes, namely, understanding and processing a whole through three distinct and related parts. One can formulate many concrete models of three-way decision to account for different interpretations of the three parts. By interpreting the three parts as three levels, this paper investigates tri-level thinking to build concrete models of three-way decision. We examine some fundamental issues and basic ingredients of tri-level thinking. In accordance with the data–information–knowledge–wisdom (DIKW) hierarchy, we present a perception–cognition–action (PCA) tri-level conceptual model that is applicable to studying intelligent data analytics, intelligent systems, and human understanding.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported in part by a Discovery Grant from NSERC, Canada. The author thanks Dr. Jinhai Li for his encouragement and support. The author thanks Dr. Guangming Lang, Dr. Baoli Wang, Dr. Yumei Wang, Dr. Jilin Yang, Dr. Xianyong Zhang, Dr. Xue Rong Zhao, and Farial Syed for their valuable comments. The author is grateful to anonymous reviewers for their supportive and constructive comments.

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  1. Department of Computer Science, University of Regina, Regina, Saskatchewan, S4S 0A2, Canada

    Yiyu Yao

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Yao, Y. Tri-level thinking: models of three-way decision. Int. J. Mach. Learn. & Cyber. 11, 947–959 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13042-019-01040-2

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