Publications by Joel Cadwell
Combating Multicollinearity by Asking the Right Questions and Uncovering Latent Features
Overview. When responding to questions about brand perceptions or product feature satisfaction, consumers construct a rating by relying on their overall satisfaction with the brand or product plus some general category knowledge of how difficult it is to deliver each feature. In order to get pass such halo effects, we need to ask questions tha...
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Let’s Do Some MORE Hierarchical Bayes Choice Modeling in R!
R enables us to “test drive” statistical models by running simulations and analyzing actual data. We can look at the output and get some sense of how the whole thing works. The goal is to provide a realistic application that is not too difficult to follow: here is the data, next reformat that data into a form that the function can...
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Net Promoter Mixture Modeling: Can a Single Likelihood Rating Reveal Customer Segments?
Net Promoter believes that customers come in one of three forms: promoters (happy yellows), passives (neutral grays), or detractors (angry reds). Cluster identification is relatively easy for all you need to do is ask the “ultimate question” concerning likelihood to recommend. As the figure indicates, the top two boxes are promoters, the bott...
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Building Blocks: A Compelling Image for Clustering with Nonnegative Matrix Factorization (NMF)
Would hierarchical clustering be as popular without the dendrogram? Cannot the same be said of finite mixture modeling with its multidimensional spaces populated by normal distributions? I invite you to move your mouse over the figure on the introductory page of the website for the R package mclust and click through all the graphics that bring mi...
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In Praise of Substantive Expertise in Data Science
Substantive expertise makes it into the Data Science Venn Diagram from DataCamp’s infographic on how to become a data scientist. It’s one of the three circles of equal size along with programming and statistics. Regrettably, substantive expertise is never mentioned in the definition of a data scientist as “someone who is better at statisti...
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Archetypal Analysis: Similarity Defined by Distances from Contrasting Ideals
Carl Jung was at least partially correct. We do tend to think in terms of the extremes as shown in this archetypal wheel with rulers versus outlaws and heroes versus caregivers at different ends of bipolar dimensions. Happily, we are not required to accept Jung’s collective unconscious to explain this tendency. Metaphorical thinking works just ...
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Contextual Measurement Is a Game Changer
Adding a context can change one’s frame of reference:Are you courteous? Are you courteous at work? Decontextualized questions tend to activate a self-presentation strategy and retrieve memories of past positioning of oneself (impression management). Such personality inventories can be completed without ever thinking about how we actually beha...
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Some Applications of Item Response Theory in R
The typical introduction to item response theory (IRT) positions the technique as a form of curve fitting. We believe that a latent continuous variable is responsible for the observed dichotomous or polytomous responses to a set of items (e.g., multiple choice questions on an exam or rating scales from a survey). Literally, once I kno...
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Wine for Breakfast: Consumption Occasion as the Unit of Analysis
If the thought of a nice Chianti with that breakfast croissant is not that appealing, then I have made by point: occasion shapes consumption. Our tastes have been fashioned by culture and shared practice. Yet, we often ignore the context and run our analyses as if consumers were not nested within situations. Contextual effects are attributed to t...
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Brand and Product Category Representation: Precursors to Preference Construction
Evidently, preference is contextual, or so The Hershey’s Company claims in their advertising. I agree and will not repeat the argument made in a previous post on incorporating preference construction into the choice modeling process.Within the framework of utility theory and conjoint analysis, R provides both an introduction (Stated Preference ...
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