A Novel Method of Variable Selection in Data Envelopment Analysis with Entropy Measures

In data envelopment analysis (DEA) modelling applications, analysts typically experience difficulty in choosing variables when the number of variables is greater than the number of decision-making units (DMUs). In this paper, we develop a novel method to facilitate variable selection in DEA using entropy theory to avoid information redundancy. A numerical analysis is provided to compare our method to those of related studies. The results show that our proposed method produces a lower Akaike information criteria (AIC) value than other approaches. By presenting a real-world case, we show that this new method yields useful managerial results.