News

Members of CMC attended the International Choice Modelling Conference (ICMC) last week in Puerto Varas, Chile. We presented/co-authored 16 presentations, with the full list given below.   Paper title Authors (CMC members in bold) Links to slides Investigating the effect of imputing trip purposes in a trip generation model Azam Ali, Ellen Flaata, Trude Torset,...

Academic positions: Do you have research expertise in Choice Modelling and/or Machine Learning? Are you interested in conducting methodological research to develop new approaches? Would you like to implement novel methodologies to advance the state-of-the-art in behavioural modelling and make a real-world impact? The Choice Modelling Centre at the Institute for Transport Studies seeks to...

Unravelling joint decision processes: the case of business travel Many decisions involve multiple parties. From a couple choosing which car to buy, to business partners agreeing on a strategy, to employer and employee jointly planning annual leave. Most statistical models used to represent decision-making only consider an individual perspective, limiting the potential for truly understanding...

We are looking for highly motivated students to conduct PhD research in the field of choice modelling. See the following opportunities: Understanding preferences and modelling ‘difficult’ choices through virtual reality experiences. Developing new behavioural models at the intersection of psychology and econometrics. Developing new behavioural models at the intersection of econometrics and machine learning.

Academic positions: Do you have research expertise in Choice Modelling, Machine Learning and/or Mathematical Psychology? Are you interested in conducting methodological research to bridge these disciplines? Would you like to implement novel methodologies to advance the state-of-the-art in behavioural modelling and make a real-world impact? The Choice Modelling Centre at the Institute for Transport Studies...

We are pleased to announce the following positions: Academic position: Research Fellow in Choice Modelling and Applied Economics   Fully-funded PhD positions: Developing new behavioural models at the intersection of econometrics and machine learning. Developing new behavioural models at the intersection of psychology and econometrics.

Members of CMC attended the IATBR in Chile in mid-December. We presented/co-authored 8 presentations, with the full list given below. Further slides will be added in due course.   Paper title Authors (CMC members in bold) Links to slides Investigating the sources of heterogeneity in the context of preferences towards new transport modes. Thomas Hancock,...

Members of CMC attended the International Choice Modelling Conference last week in Iceland. We presented/co-authored 27 presentations, with the full list given below. Further slides will be added in due course.   Paper title Authors (CMC members in bold) Links to slides A choice modelling analysis of pro-environmental behaviour spillover Gloria Amaris, Stepan Vesely and...

Dear colleagues,  We are pleased to announce the release of Apollo v0.2.7. You can update your current version directly from CRAN by calling install.packages(“apollo”). Alongside usual bug fixes and minor improvements, there are two key new feature in Apollo v0.2.7: 1. the Delta method (apollo_deltaMethod) can now be used to compute standard errors for any user specified function,...

You can now book onto our 2022 course. Please see https://cmc.leeds.ac.uk/courses-phds/cpd/ for details.

We are pleased to invite candidates to submit applications to the following competition-funded PhD topics in choice modelling: Improving the understanding and prediction of human behaviour over time  Modelling difficult choices combining virtual reality and physiological data  Nudging towards greener air travel behaviour Modelling the preference for transport modes of the future using Virtuocity  For...

We’re delighted to announce that a CMC paper by T. Hancock, S. Hess, C.F. Choudhury & P. Tsoleridis on Decision field theory was awarded the inaugural David A. Hensher ‘Best Transport Demand Modelling Paper Prize’ at ATRF 2021. Read it here: http://stephanehess.me.uk/papers/working_papers/Hancock_Choudhury_Hess_Paschalidis_2021.pdf

CMC and ITS Alumnus Dr. Md Bashirul Haque has received Dean’s Award 2020 from Shahjalal University of Science and Technology, Bangladesh for one of the papers published from his PhD dissertation “Understanding differences in residential location preferences between ownership and renting: A case study of London” (co-authored by supervisors Dr. Charisma Choudhury and Prof. Stephane...

Dear colleagues, We are delighted to announce the following speakers for our ICMC online event, which will be hosted on Zoom. Please sign up here - icmc2021online.eventbrite.co.uk We hope to you there! Stephane & Erlend Time Topic Speaker Title Monday 24th of May (all times are BST)  12.00 - 13.00 Retail preferences Tomás Rossetti [1] (Cornell University)...

We are delighted to announce that CMC's Stephane Hess has been awarded a prestigious ERC Advanced Grant, with a value of €2.5M for a duration of five years. The ERC advanced grants are a highly competitive scheme, with a success rate of around 8%. The scheme is for ground-breaking high-risk projects, and are assessed on...

You can now book onto our 2021 courses. Please see https://cmc.leeds.ac.uk/courses-phds/cpd/ for details.

CMC member Romain Crastes dit Sourd has been invited to give a talk at the pan-institute Series of Webinars in Economics of Environment, Energy and Transports (SWEEET) on Tuesday 2 February at 15:00 GMT. Romain will present his recent work on using a new shifted log-normal distribution for mitigating the ‘exploding’ implicit price problems in mixed logit...

We are pleased to announce the following three new projects: Improving the understanding and prediction of human behaviour over time. Modelling ‘difficult’ choices combining virtual reality, physiological and neurological data. Modelling transport and energy choices combining machine learning and econometric techniques using emerging big data sources. The application deadline for all three of the above...

Congratulations to Dr Thomas Hancock who has won the 2019 Eric Pas award for the best PhD dissertation in travel behaviour research for his thesis entitled "Travel behaviour modelling at the interface between econometrics and mathematical psychology”. Thomas’s work created bridges between disciplines, with important new developments in transitioning models from mathematical psychology to real-world...

CMC's Stephane Hess last week gave a conference keynote at EWGT 2020: The 23rd Euro Working Group on Transportation, presenting "Travel behaviour modelling with novel data sources". For more information on this topic, see Stephane's list of publications here.

The Choice Modelling Centre (CMC) is pleased to introduce a new online seminar series. The seminars will cover all aspects of choice modelling and will be aimed at a cross-disciplinary audience. In general, there will be one seminar per week, on a Tuesday. With some exceptions, such as speakers from East Asia and Australia, the...

We are excited to announce a new version of Apollo, the flexible R package for choice modelling. Version 0.1.0 includes our biggest set of changes so far, including: addition of an ordered probit module to the library of pre-coded functions improved memory usage for multi-core estimation stability improvements additional checks to facilitate coding of even...

Our June 2020 course has been postponed. However, we are pleased to announce that it has been rescheduled for October. Places at our 2020 CPD choice modelling courses can now be booked online. For more information, please see here. To book onto the courses, please follow the links below: Advanced choice modelling course - October...

A number of CMC members will be presenting work at TRB2020 this year. Please see a full list of our talks and posters below.

Which one should we choose? Developing statistical models to explain and forecast joint decision making. The Choice Modelling Centre and the Institute for Transport Studies are looking for a motivated PhD student to work on a timely and ambitious project aimed at advancing our understanding and prediction of how people make choices jointly in different...

Stephane Hess and David Palma have obtained funding from the European Research Council under the Proof of Concept scheme for further developing Apollo, their state-of-the-art free software for choice model estimation and application. Try Apollo for your choice models: www.ApolloChoiceModelling.com

Stephane Hess and David Palma are excited to announce the release of Apollo, their free software for advanced choice modelling. This unique package covers a wide set of existing models, allows users to code their own models, and incorporates facilities for both classical and Bayesian estimation, as well as numerous pre and post-estimation functions. The...

Details for CMC's two annual courses are now available here.

Stephane Hess, director of the Choice Modelling Centre, has been appointed as Honorary Professor of modelling behaviour in Africa at the University of Cape Town. This builds on ongoing research collaborations that seek to use choice modelling to help address crucial issues in health, education and safety in an African setting. The work also looks...

We are delighted to announce that, following a promotion panel held recently, CMC member Dr Charisma Choudhury has been promoted to Associate Professor in Transport Engineering & Emerging Economies. This is in recognition of Charisma’s internationally-leading research in developing and using choice modelling techniques – with a particular focus on modelling driving decisions, and in...

CMC members David Palma and Stephane Hess attended the Interdisciplinary Choice Workshop in Santiago, Chile, this week. David gave two presentations whilst Stephane gave a keynote entitled "From brainwaves to utilities: what can choice modellers learn from neuroscience and mathematical psychology?"

CMC member Stephane Hess was recently hosted by METRANS Transportation Center and the Leonard D. Schaeffer Center for Health Policy & Economics at the University of Southern California, where he presented "From behaviour to data to models and back again: where next for understanding and predicting human decision-making?" and discussed collaborations in health research.

Over a year has passed since the memorable fifth International Choice Modelling Conference (ICMC), organised in Cape Town by Mark Zuidgeest and Hazvinei Moyo. If you couldn't make it to Cape Town or just want to refresh your memories, have a look at our ICMC 2017 report We are now looking forward to ICMC 2019, which...

Following on from the end of IATBR-2018, several members of CMC attended a workshop held in honour of Daniel McFadden. Several leading choice modellers from across the world presented their latest work, including CMC's Stephane Hess, who presented "Homo economicus vs the reptilian brain: insights from mathematical psychology and neuroscience" and also Chiara Calastri, who presented "Using ubiquitous data...

Several members of CMC attended and presented work at the 15th international conference on travel behaviour research (IATBR-2018). In this photo along with members of CMC are three leading experts of our field; Daniel McFadden, Moshe Ben-Akiva and Kenneth Train.

  CMC are delighted to announce that Chiara Calastri, former PhD student and current postdoc at CMC, has been announced as the winner of the 2017 Eric Pas Dissertation Competition. Her thesis, "Capturing and modelling complex decision-making in the context of travel, time use and social interactions" is available to read here.

10 Leeds based CMC members attended the 97th Transportation Research Meeting in Washington, D.C. in January 2018. The Leeds members of CMC were authors on a total of 17 presentations and posters presented at the conference.

The Choice Modelling Centre (CMC) at the University of Leeds has developed flexible estimation code for choice models in R. The code uses the complete opposite of a black-box approach, i.e. the user sees every step in the coding of a log-likelihood function. We believe this to be essential in ensuring a greater understanding by...

CMC's Chiara Calastri won the best Postgraduate Teaching (PGR Student) at the recent Leeds University Partnership Awards. Click here for more details.

17 Leeds based CMC members attended the 5th International Choice Modelling Conference in Cape Town in April 2017 (pictured together here). The Leeds members of CMC alone were authors on 25 of the 164 papers presented at the conference, and there were a further 16 papers by our affiliate members.

CMC's Stephane Hess, together with Marek Giergiczny, won the prize for the most innovative application in choice modelling at ICMC 2017 in Cape Town, with their paper "Using advanced choice models to study animal behaviour."

At ICMC 2017 in Cape Town, CMC student Thomas Hancock was awarded the best student-led paper for his paper "Decision field theory- improvements to current methodology and contrasts with standard choice modelling techniques," written with supervisors and fellow CMC members Stephane Hess and Charisma Choudhury.

In January, CMC members enjoyed their annual retreat to the Yorkshire Dales along with former PhD student James Fox and visiting CMC collaborator Marek Giergiczny. As well as discussing important current topics in choice modelling, some of us enjoyed a foggy walk up Buckden Pike.