Academic from the Department of Statistics UdeC will present work at a prestigious international conference

The International Association for Travel Behavior Research make a new version of the International Conference on Behavioral Research in Travel, this time in its version number 16 from December 11 to 15 in Santiago de Chile in dependencies of the Pontificia U. Católica. On this occasion, the central theme will be “Mobility in a post-pandemic world”.

Some of the subtopics to be discussed will focus on the current unprecedented challenges to understand and forecast travel behavior in a context of high uncertainty due to the pandemic, user behavior and transport supply and its changes, in addition to exchange ideas and insights in better understanding and forecasting travel behaviour, exploiting new data sources and bringing the state of the art methodology to the frontier through multidisciplinary scientific collaboration.

In this context, it is that the academic of the Department of Statistics of the UdeC, Patricio Salas will present on December 14 his research entitled “Global and Local Variable Importance from Multinomial Logit Model Using Shapley Values ​​- Based Methods: A Travel Mode Choice Application” , which proposes using two methods based on the calculation of Shapley values ​​(SV) to analyze the importance of the explanatory variables at the global and local level on the probabilities of choice predicted from the Multinomial Logit model. “Specifically, we use Shapley decomposition and the SHapley Additive exPlanation (SHAP) method to obtain the importance of variables at the global and local levels, respectively. The above is applied to synthetic data to show the benefits of both methods in a controlled environment. Finally, the results obtained from the analysis of three real databases used by other researchers are shown”, explains the researcher.

“Our results show that methods based on the calculation of SVs provide analysts with valuable information to analyze variables that deserve further effort and investigation. In addition, the combination of traditional inference with the analysis of the importance of the variables generates a synergy that could be beneficial for decision-making and policies generated from an MNL model”, points out the UdeC academic.

It should be noted that the event will be attended by renowned experts in the area, including Chandra Bath, an academic from the U. of Texas, USA, internationally recognized as a leading expert in the field of travel demand modeling and travel behavior analysis and Stephane Hess, academic from the U. of Leeds, England, who is internationally recognized in the study based on data and mathematical modeling of behavior of human choice, who will present their research on the same day as Professor Salas .

The conference, which has been held since the early 1970s and is held on a rotating basis in different continents, will have the participation of hundreds of participants from all parts of the world and will be a space to exchange and publicize research. which are also carried out from Chile, covering the wide spectrum of applied and fundamental areas in which the study of traveler behavior affects.