BAYESIAN ANALYSIS OF THE VAN BAAREN MODEL FOR PAIRED COMPARISON

Year 2013, Volume: 42 Issue: 5, 569 - 580, 01.05.2013

Saima Altaf Muhammad Aslam Muhammad Aslam

Abstract

The technique of paired comparison is being commonly studied thesedays because of its attractive applications for the comparison of several objects, simultaneously. This technique permits the ranking of theobjects by means of a score, which reflects the merit of the items ona linear scale. The present study is concerned with the Bayesian analysis of a paired comparison model, namely the van Baaren model VIusing the informative and the conjugate priors. For this purpose, aninclusive elicitation technique to evaluate the hyperparameters of theprior distributions has also been elaborated. The joint posterior distribution for the parameters of the model, their marginal distributionsand their inferences are obtained via programming in the SAS package.The model is also tested for its appropriateness.

Keywords

Bayesian hypothesis testing, Conjugate prior, Informative prior, Posterior distribution, Predictive probability

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