Ortelli, N., Hillel, T., Pereira, F. C., de Lapparent, M., and Bierlaire, M. (2021)

Assisted Specification of Discrete Choice Models, Journal of Choice Modelling 39(100285):.

Determining appropriate utility specifications for discrete choice models is time-consuming and prone to errors. As the number of possible functions exponentially grows with the vari- ables under consideration, analysts need to spend increasing amounts of time on searching for good specifications through trial-and-error and expert knowledge. This paper proposes a data-driven algorithm that aims at assisting modelers in their search. Our approach trans- lates the task into a multi-objective combinatorial optimization problem and makes use of a variant of the variable neighborhood search algorithm to generate solutions. We apply the algorithm to a real mode choice dataset as a proof of concept. The results demonstrate its ability to generate high-quality specifications in reasonable amounts of time.

doi:10.1016/j.jocm.2021.100285 (click here for the full paper)