Study on Retrieval of Rental Apartments Database Using Acceptability Functions

Abstract

We apply acceptability functions, which is a new method for multi-objective optimization and multi-objective database retrieval, to a task of retrieving rental apartments and evaluate its effectiveness through human subjective tests.Acceptability function is a definition of human characteristics per each objective and defines how he/she accepts each objective along to its values. Total acceptability function is formed on a multi-objective space by synthesizing acceptability functions for all objectives and gives the total acceptability value to each of retrieved apartment, and we can use them to the display ranking of retrieved apartments.Two experimental evaluations are conducted. The first one is that human subjects compare the proposed apartment retrieval system that gives ranks to all retrieved apartment and a conventional retrieval system that outputs all apartments satisfying search conditions without ranks. The results has shown that the proposed one was more preferable. The second evaluation is to check how the ranking from our system and that from human subjects is similar. Spears' ranked-correlations has shown their high similarity.