Selection of input–output items and data disposal in data envelopment analysis

In this paper, we discuss the selection of input–output items and data disposal in data envelopment analysis (DEA). Cooper, Seiford and Tone provided the requirements of the input–output items' selection. But in practice, we found some problems whose input and output items' selection are not satisfied with these requirements, which makes the DEA unsuitable. Through analysis, we can make some of these problems satisfy the demand of the items' selection in DEA by converting the data. This approach broadens the scale of DEA's application. In this article, we give the method of items' selection and data disposal, and discuss the selection of input–output variety quantity in the inverse DEA.