An approach for clustering consumers by their top‐box and top‐choice responses
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Cluster analysis is often used to group consumers based on their hedonic responses to products. We give a motivating example in which conventional cluster analyses converge on a solution where consumers do not agree on which products they like. We show why this occurs. We state a goal: to group together consumers who have a shared opinion of which products are delightful and which products are not delightful, apart from consumers who have a different opinion. To meet this goal, we code consumers' hedonic responses in ways inspired by top‐k box analysis, then cluster consumers using b‐cluster analysis. For comparison, we cluster consumers using two conventional methods. We interpret each cluster by focusing on which product(s) the cluster accepts and whether a large proportion of cluster members are aligned in accepting these products. Solutions from b‐cluster analysis based on top‐k box‐inspired codings met our goal better than conventional approaches, indicating that these methods deserve further study. Practical Applications Cluster analysis outcomes are profoundly shaped by a researcher's decisions related to response coding and clustering algorithm. This paper highlights the importance of determining the goal of the cluster analysis first, then selecting a response coding and clustering algorithm to best meet this goal. Our stated goal is one that is frequently of interest in sensory evaluation but is not well met by conventional clustering approaches. The novel approaches that we give in this paper meet the goal and are available using software that is freely available in the public domain.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.010 | 0.029 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.001 |
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; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
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".