Inferring psychological traits from spending categories and dynamic consumption patterns
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract In recent years there has been a growing interest in analyzing human behavioral data generated by new technologies. One type of digital footprint that is universal across the world, but that has received relatively little attention to date, is spending behavior. In this paper, using the transaction records of 1306 bank customers, we investigated the extent to which individual-level psychological characteristics can be inferred from bank transaction data. Specifically, we developed a more comprehensive feature space using: (1) overall spending behavior (i.e. total number and total amount of transaction), (2) temporal spending behavior (i.e. variability, persistence, and burstiness), (3) category-related spending behavior (i.e. diversity, persistence, and turnover), (4) customer category profile, and (5) socio-demographic information. Using these features, we first explore their association with individual psychological characteristics, we then analyze the performances of the different feature families and finally, we try to understand to what extent psychological characteristics from spending records can be inferred. Our results show that inferring the psychological traits of an individual is a challenging task, even when using a comprehensive set of features that take temporal aspects of spending into account. We found that Materialism and Self-Control could be inferred with relatively high levels of accuracy, while the accuracy obtained for the Big Five traits was lower, with only Extraversion and Neuroticism reaching reasonable classification performances. Hence, for traits like Materialism, Self-control, Extraversion, and Neuroticism our findings could be used to improve psychologically-informed advertising strategies for specific products as well as personality-based spending management apps and credit scoring approaches.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 it