Extracting Summary Piles from Sorting Task Data
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In a sorting task, consumers receive a set of representational items (e.g., products, brands) and sort them into piles such that the items in each pile “go together.” The sorting task is flexible in accommodating different instructions and has been used for decades in exploratory marketing research in brand positioning and categorization. However, no general analytic procedures yet exist for analyzing sorting task data without performing arbitrary transformations to the data that influence the results and insights obtained. This manuscript introduces a flexible framework for analyzing sorting task data, as well as a new optimization approach to identify summary piles, which provide an easy way to explore associations consumers make among a set of items. Using two Monte Carlo simulations and an empirical application of single-serving snacks from a local retailer, the authors demonstrate that the resulting procedure is scalable, can provide additional insights beyond those offered by existing procedures, and requires mere minutes of computational time.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.042 | 0.024 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".