Dynamic Question Design for Efficient Estimation of Aggregate Human Preferences

Abstract

This paper addresses the problem of efficiently estimating aggregate human preferences by dynamically adapting questions based on respondents'answers. To this end, we formulate and address two sub-problems: preference estimation and question design. First, regarding preference estimation, we model respondents' preferences and estimate them using Bayesian estimation, employing a particle filter as a computationally efficient approximation. The main theoretical contribution to this sub-problem is to analyze the preference estimation error using an information-theoretic approach, deriving a theoretical lower bound for the error. Second, regarding question design, we formulate the design problem as an Expected Information Gain maximization problem and employ an epsilon-greedy strategy to solve the problem in a computationally efficient way. We theoretically analyze the search efficiency of the approach, demonstrating that it achieves higher efficiency than a random search. Finally, we verify the effectiveness of the proposed method through numerical simulations.