Tri-level thinking: models of three-way decision

The underlying philosophy of three-way decision is thinking in threes, namely, understanding and processing a whole through three distinct and related parts. One can formulate many concrete models of three-way decision to account for different interpretations of the three parts. By interpreting the three parts as three levels, this paper investigates tri-level thinking to build concrete models of three-way decision. We examine some fundamental issues and basic ingredients of tri-level thinking. In accordance with the data–information–knowledge–wisdom (DIKW) hierarchy, we present a perception–cognition–action (PCA) tri-level conceptual model that is applicable to studying intelligent data analytics, intelligent systems, and human understanding.