A statistical approach to measure the consistency level of the pairwise comparison matrix

The consistency of the pairwise comparison matrix (PCM) has been extensively studied in the Analytic Hierarchy Process. Most of the existing approaches for the consistency test of the PCM are based on the consistency ratio threshold (0.1) introduced by Saaty (1977). To accurately measure the consistency level of the PCM, a statistical approach based on the significance level is proposed in this paper by combining the hypothesis test and the random consistency index. The proposed statistical approach is applied to an education evaluation problem in order to demonstrate the rationality and reliability of it.