Mixtures-of-experts models for rank data

Speaker: Claire Gormley, BA (Mod) (UCD School of Mathematical Sciences)

Time: 4:00PM
Date: Fri 24th November 2006

Location: Mathematical Sciences Seminar Room

Abstract
The social factors which drive voting preferences are often of interest. A heterogeneous sample of voters from the 1997 Irish presidential election are analysed using a mixtures-of-experts model which take account of both a voter’s covariates and their ballot. The Irish electoral system gives rise to a wealth of preference data – Benter’s model for rank data is thus incorporated to model the ranked nature of the voting data. Model fitting is conducted using a compound EM/MM algotithm. Results identify age and government satisfaction levels as influential social factors.

(This talk is part of the Statistics and Actuarial Science series.)