Testing Transitivity of Preferences on Two-Alternative Forced Choice Data

As Duncan Luce and other prominent scholars have pointed out on several occasions, testing algebraic models against empirical data raises difficult conceptual, mathematical, and statistical challenges. Empirical data often result from statistical sampling processes, whereas algebraic theories are nonprobabilistic. Many probabilistic specifications lead to statistical boundary problems and are subject to nontrivial order constrained statistical inference. The present paper discusses Luce's challenge for a particularly prominent axiom: Transitivity. The axiom of transitivity is a central component in many algebraic theories of preference and choice. We offer the currently most complete solution to the challenge in the case of transitivity of binary preference on the theory side and two-alternative forced choice on the empirical side, explicitly for up to five, and implicitly for up to seven, choice alternatives. We also discuss the relationship between our proposed solution and weak stochastic transitivity. We recommend to abandon the latter as a model of transitive individual preferences

Bayesian Network Learning via Topological Order

We propose a mixed integer programming (MIP) model and iterative algorithms based on topological orders to solve optimization problems with acyclic constraints on a directed graph. The proposed MIP model has a significantly lower number of constraints compared to popular MIP models based on cycle elimination constraints and triangular inequalities. The proposed iterative algorithms use gradient descent and iterative reordering approaches, respectively, for searching topological orders. A computational experiment is presented for the Gaussian Bayesian network learning problem, an optimization problem minimizing the sum of squared errors of regression models with L1 penalty over a feature network with application of gene network inference in bioinformatics

On the Relaxation Polytope of the Linear Ordering Problem

this paper also we present a constructive operation (5-Extension) for generating new facets of the linear ordering polytope P n . By connecting Mobius ladders with special digraphs 5-Extensio