{"id":5806,"date":"2016-08-03T00:06:21","date_gmt":"2016-08-03T04:06:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.decisionsciencenews.com\/?p=5806"},"modified":"2016-08-03T08:55:04","modified_gmt":"2016-08-03T12:55:04","slug":"heuristica-r-package-testing-models-binary-choice","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.decisionsciencenews.com\/?p=5806","title":{"rendered":"Heuristica: An R package for testing models of binary choice"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>CLASSIC HEURISTICS AND DATA SETS ALL IN ONE TIDY PACKAGE<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><a href=\"http:\/\/www.decisionsciencenews.com\/2016\/08\/03\/heuristica-r-package-testing-models-binary-choice\/shtmus\/\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-5807\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-5807\" src=\"http:\/\/www.decisionsciencenews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/08\/shtmus.jpg\" alt=\"shtmus\" width=\"388\" height=\"568\" \/><\/a>\n<\/p>\n<p>It just got a lot easier to simulate the performance of simple heuristics.<\/p>\n<p>Jean Czerlinski Whitmore, a software engineer at Google with a long history in modeling cognition, and Daniel Barkoczi, a postdoctoral fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, have created <a href=\"https:\/\/cran.r-project.org\/web\/packages\/heuristica\/\">heuristica<\/a>: an <a href=\"https:\/\/cran.r-project.org\/\">R<\/a> package to model the performance of simple heuristics. It comprises the heuristics covered in the first chapters of <a href=\"http:\/\/amzn.to\/2agRk6u\">Simple Heuristics That Make Us Smart<\/a> such as Take The Best, Unit Weighted Linear model, and more. The package also includes data, such as the the original German cities data set which has become a benchmark for testing heuristic models of choice, cited in hundreds of papers.<\/p>\n<p>A good place to start is the <a href=\"https:\/\/cran.r-project.org\/web\/packages\/heuristica\/vignettes\/README.html\">README <\/a>vignette, as with vignettes:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/cran.r-project.org\/web\/packages\/heuristica\/vignettes\/cross-validation.html\">Comparing the performance of simple heuristics using the Heuristica R package<\/a><\/li>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/cran.r-project.org\/web\/packages\/heuristica\/vignettes\/how-to-make-heuristic.html\" target=\"_blank\">How to make your own heuristic<\/a><\/li>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/cran.r-project.org\/web\/packages\/heuristica\/vignettes\/reproducing-results.html\" target=\"_blank\">Reproducing Results<\/a> (Take The Best vs. regression on city population)<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Here&#8217;s the <a href=\"https:\/\/cran.r-project.org\/web\/packages\/heuristica\/index.html\">heuristica package&#8217;s home on CRAN<\/a> and here&#8217;s a description of the package in the authors&#8217; own words:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>The heuristica R package implements <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Heuristic\">heuristic<\/a> decision models, such as <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Take-the-best_heuristic\">Take The Best<\/a> (TTB) and a <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Unit-weighted_regression\">unit-weighted linear model<\/a>. The models are designed for two-alternative choice tasks, such as which of two schools has a higher drop-out rate. The package also wraps more well-known models like regression and logistic regression into the two-alternative choice framework so all these models can be assessed side-by-side. It provides functions to measure accuracy, such as an overall <code>percentCorrect<\/code> and, for advanced users, some <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Confusion_matrix\">confusion matrix<\/a> functions. These measures can be applied in-sample or out-of-sample.<\/p>\n<p>The goal is to make it easy to explore the range of conditions in which simple heuristics are better than more complex models. Optimizing is not always better!<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>It just got a lot easier to simulate the performance of simple heuristics.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[4,16,13,74,15],"tags":[1442,1438,422,205,208,1436,22,1437,1444,486,1208,964,1404,209,879,1440,1443,1441,1003,471,644,1439],"class_list":["post-5806","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-encyclopedia","category-ideas","category-programs","category-r","category-tools","tag-best","tag-czerlinski","tag-dawes","tag-gigerenzer","tag-goldstein","tag-heuristica","tag-heuristics","tag-jean","tag-make","tag-programming","tag-r","tag-regression","tag-rule","tag-simple","tag-smart","tag-take","tag-that","tag-the","tag-unit","tag-us","tag-weight","tag-whitmore"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4LKj-1vE","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.decisionsciencenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5806","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.decisionsciencenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.decisionsciencenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.decisionsciencenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.decisionsciencenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5806"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.decisionsciencenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5806\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5813,"href":"https:\/\/www.decisionsciencenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5806\/revisions\/5813"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.decisionsciencenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5806"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.decisionsciencenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5806"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.decisionsciencenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5806"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}