International Journal of Intelligent Computing and Cybernetics

Purpose – Understanding efficiency levels is crucial for understanding the competitive structure of a market and/or segments of a market. The purpose of this paper is to assess the market performance of the top retailers in the USA using 2007 operating data. It also aims to benchmark the performance of neuro-intelligence models against traditional statistical techniques.

Design/methodology/approach – This paper uses neuro-intelligence models to classify the relative efficiency of top USA retailers. Accuracy indices derived from the application of a non-parametric data envelopment analysis approach are used to assess the classification accuracy of the models.

Findings – Results indicate that the neuro-intelligence models are superior to traditional statistical methods. The paper also shows that the neuro-intelligence models have a great potential for the classification of retailers' relative efficiency due to their robustness and flexibility of modeling algorithms.

Originality/value – The paper contributes practically and methodologically through the comparison of various parametric and non-parametric techniques, which results in considerable information for business analysis.