Supplier selection based on hierarchical potential support vector machine

Supplier selection is an important and widely studied topic since it has significant impact on purchasing management in supply chain. Recently, support vector machine has received much more attention from researchers, while studies on supplier selection based on it are few. In this paper, a new support vector machine technology, potential support vector machine, is introduced and then combined with decision tree to address issues on supplier selection including feature selection, multiclass classification and so on. So, hierarchical potential support vector machine and hierarchical system of features are put forward in the paper, and experiments show the proposed methodology has much better generalization performance and less computation consumptions than standard support vector machine. 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.