西安交通大学管理学院    管理科学前沿讲座

Rational Choice Models: The Temporal Tree Representation

讲座专家：薛梦莹 特聘副研究员

时间：2023.12.12  16:00

地点：管理学院311会议室

主办：管理科学系

摘要：Choice models, specifying the consumer's choice probability of an option over a given choice set, are widely studied and applied in many fields. We propose a temporal tree representation of choice that covers all rational choice models. Compared with the existing structural choice models, the tree representation exhibits two major advantages that overcome the major challenges of model identification. First, all rational choice models have a tree representation, and a subclass of tree representation (with set-dependent branching) has a one-to-one
correspondence to the rational choice models. This bridges the gap in the existing characterizations of structural models, which are unidentifiable,impose uninterpretable conditions, or do not cover the entire space of rational choice models. Second, the tree representation allows for the flexibility of systematically specifying the choice model structure based on available knowledge and data. ln particular, the number of parameters needed to specify a tree representation can be primarily determined by the sufficient knowledge level, which corresponds to a specific layer of the tree branching. The sufficient knowledge level can be empirically determined based on the amount of available data, which in turn determines the number of parameters needed for model estimation.Therefore, the tree representation allows for a natural way of data integration, avoiding
misspecification due to restrictive assumptions and overfitting for general models.

个人简介：薛梦莹，中国科学技术大学管理学院特任副教授。研究兴趣包括数据驱动优化理论、消费选择模型、可靠性网络设计、运筹学在能源优化领域的应用等。主持一项国家自然科学基金青年项目。研究成果发表在多个SCI期刊上，其中包括管理科学领域的顶级期刊POMS和M&SOM，其研究成果也被中石
油、京东多家企业应用。2018年她所在团队的研究成果入围了运筹学领域应用最高奖项Franz Edelman Award决赛。

信息来源：http://som.xjtu.edu.cn/info/1056/10228.htm