A Hybrid ANP Method for Evaluation of Government Data Sustainability

The evaluation of government data sustainability is a multicriteria decision making problem. The analytic network process (ANP) is among the most popular methods in determining the weights of criteria, and its limitation is the un-convergence problem. This paper proposes a hybrid ANP (HANP) method, which aims to improve the ANP by combining the weights obtained from the analytic hierarchy process (AHP). The proposed method is proved to be convergent since the network of the H-ANP is strongly connected. According to the simulation experiments, H-ANP is more robust than ANP under different settings of parameters. It also shows a higher Kendall cor-relationship and lower MSE with respect to AHP, compared with the existing method (e.g., the averagely connected ANP method). An empirical example is also provided, which uses H-ANP to evaluate the government data sustainability of a city.