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Poster
Pairwise Choice Markov Chains
Stephen Ragain · Johan Ugander

Tue Dec 06 09:00 AM -- 12:30 PM (PST) @ Area 5+6+7+8 #11
in Tuesday Posters »

As datasets capturing human choices grow in richness and scale, particularly in online domains, there is an increasing need for choice models flexible enough to handle data that violate traditional choice-theoretic axioms such as regularity, stochastic transitivity, or Luce's choice axiom. In this work we introduce the Pairwise Choice Markov Chain (PCMC) model of discrete choice, an inferentially tractable model that does not assume these traditional axioms while still satisfying the foundational axiom of uniform expansion, which can be viewed as a weaker version of Luce's axiom. We show that the PCMC model significantly outperforms the Multinomial Logit (MNL) model in prediction tasks on two empirical data sets known to exhibit violations of Luce's axiom. Our analysis also synthesizes several recent observations connecting the Multinomial Logit model and Markov chains; the PCMC model retains the Multinomial Logit model as a special case.

Keywords: (Other) Probabilistic Models and Methods · Ranking and Preference Learning
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Author Information

Stephen Ragain (Stanford University)
Johan Ugander (Stanford University)

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