Inverse attribute‐based optimization with an application in assortment optimization
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Many applications of inverse optimization (IO) arise in settings where the goal is to predict the future actions of an optimizing agent (e.g., an optimizing customer's future purchases). The majority of papers in this area implicitly assume an alternative‐based modeling approach: The forward model finds an optimal set of actions (decisions) from among a given set of alternatives, while the inverse model imputes objective function coefficients corresponding to these alternatives. Since the imputed weights correspond only to alternatives existing in the training set, alternative‐based modeling is limited to applications where the set of options does not change when a prediction is needed. In this paper, we apply an attribute‐based perspective, which allows IO to impute the weights of attributes that lead to an optimal decision instead of imputing the weight of the decision itself. This perspective expands the range of IO applicability; we demonstrate that it facilitates the application of IO in assortment optimization, where changing product selections is a defining feature and accurate predictions of demand are important. We compare inverse attribute‐based optimization with rank‐based and machine learning methods. We show that since IO encodes the utility optimizing behavior of the consumer into the preference learning process, it results in lower assortment regret for the store and a lower utility gap for the consumers.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| 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 it