McMASTER UNIVERSITY STATISTICS SEMINAR

Week of October 12 - 16, 1998

SPEAKER:	Dr Stephen W. Link Department of Psychology, McMaster University
TITLE:	"Predicting Individual Choice"
DAY:	Wednesday, October 14, 1998
TIME:	3:30 p.m. [Coffee in BSB-202 at 3:00 p.m.]
PLACE:	BSB-108

SUMMARY

The theory of paired comparisons is often used to determine the placement of stimuli on psychological dimensions such as the seriousness of crime, the likeableness of consumables such as fruits and vegetables, the desirability of political candidates and so forth. The procedure is lengthy, expensive and difficult to employ in field work where predicting consumer choice or the vote of a juror is the goal. Recent theoretical advances offer a new technique that greatly reduces the number of observations needed to provide accurate predictions of choices between pairs of a large number of objects. We will discuss this method and the need for new statistical measures of goodness of fit in the context of measuring the future.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Dr. Stephen W. Link received his B.A. in Psychology, Mathematics and Sociology from the University of Colorado. Becoming a Fellow in the Institute for Mathematical Studies in the Social Sciences at Stanford, he received his PhD in Psychology in 1968. Dr. Link was President of the Society for Mathematical Psychology (1982), served on the Executive Committee and Council of the Federation of Behavioral, Psychological and Cognitive Sciences in Washington, D. C. representing the scientific interests of its nearly 140,000 members and represented the field of psychology in the Washington-based Council of Science Society Presidents. His book series entitled Scientific Psychology published by Lawrence Erlbaum Associates presents high-level scientific manuscripts elicited from internationally recognized scientists. Dr. Link's scientific work focuses on human discriminability and the measurement of thought.

REFERENCES

The following references have been provided by Dr. Link to be used as background for his talk. They are on reserve at Thode Library (STATS 770: Statistics Seminar).

[1] Link, S. W. (1992), The Wave Theory of Difference and Similarity Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Publishers (in Mills Library).

[2] Link, S. W. (1990), "Modeling Imageless Thought," JOURNAL OF MATHEMATICAL PSYCHOLOGY V 34, pp. 2-41.

[3] Link, S. W., Brown, R. and King, R. (1996), "Measuring the Future," in Proceedings of the Twelfth Annual Meeting of the International Society for Psychophysics, Fechner Day 96, Padua, Italy.