Utility Models

Due: Oct 07 by 11:59pm

Weight: This assignment is worth 3% of your final grade.

Purpose: The purpose of this assignment is to get familiar with utility models, which will be the underyling modeling framework we will use for constructing choice models.

Assessment: This assignment is graded using a check system:

  • ✔+ (110%): Responses shows phenomenal thought and engagement with the course content. I will not assign these often.
  • ✔ (100%): Responses are thoughtful, well-written, and show engagement with the course content. This is the expected level of performance.
  • ✔− (50%): Responses are hastily composed, too short, and/or only cursorily engages with the course content. This grade signals that you need to improve next time. I will hopefully not assign these often.

Notice that this is essentially a pass/fail system. I’m not grading your writing ability and I’m not counting the number of words you write - I’m looking for thoughtful engagement. One or two sentences is not enough. Write at least a paragraph and show me that you did the readings assigned.

1. Get Organized

Follow these instructions:

  1. Download and edit this template.
  2. Unzip the template folder. Make sure you actually unzip it! (in Windows, right-click it and use “extract all”)
  3. Open the .Rproj file to open RStudio.
  4. Inside RStudio, open the hw5.qmd file, take notes, and write some example code as you go through the readings / exercises below.

2. Readings

Next week we will start getting into choice modeling. I have pre-recorded videos covering most of the technical concepts we will use for estimating choice models in this Youtube playlist. Feel free to look ahead at concepts we’ll be covering over the next few weeks.

For this coming week, you should watch the first video:
Introduction to Choice Modeling

Take notes as you watch the video. Throughout the video, I ask practice questions at several places - you should answer to those questions as part of your reflection. You may submit your answers however you wish, e.g. hand-write them on paper and take a picture and / or type answers in your reflection .Rmd file.

Click here to download the slides in the video as a PDF.

If you are interested in more details about the logit model, see Chapter 3 (free pdf) of Kenneth Train’s book, “Discrete Choice Methods with Simulation”

3. Reflect

Reflect on what you’ve learned while going through these readings and exercises. Is there anything that jumped out at you? Anything you found particularly interesting or confusing? Write at least a paragraph in your hw5.qmd file, and include at least one question. The teaching team will review the questions we get and will try to answer them either in Slack or in class.

If you’re unsure where to start with a reflection, try filling out this template:

“I used to think ______, now I think ______ 🤔”

4. Submit

To submit your assignment, follow these instructions:

  1. Render your .qmd file by either clicking the “Render” button in RStudio or running the command quarto::quarto_render("hw5.qmd") command.
  2. Open the rendered html file and make sure it looks good! Is all the formatting as you expected?
  3. Create a zip file of all the files in your R project folder for this assignment and submit it on the corresponding assignment submission on Blackboard.