Using a Dominance-based Rough Set Approach for Analysing Business Indicators

The study demonstrates how to extract essential information from a set of financial and non-financial business indicators, leading to a better understanding of company performance. To this end, use Rough Set Theory and the Dominance principle are used. The usage is justified by the possibility of there being uncertain data - uncertainty that needs to be treated analytically to yield an essential set of effectively consistent information. The analysis was based on the Brazilian publication Exame Melhores e Maiores 2013, which lists the 500 largest companies in various economic sectors ordered by net sales. The methods employed here can be extended to take other financial and non-financial indicators into account to infer patterns often hidden in the data. Furthermore, this study revealed the importance of broadening the analysis of enterprise indicators when the goal is, for example, to produce a more critical view for investment decisions and to measure the performance of probable competitors. (C) 2015 Published by Elsevier B.V.