Conjoint Analysis
Conjoint analysis’ is a survey based statistical technique used in market research that helps determine how people value different attributes (feature, function, benefits) that make up an individual product or service.
The objective of conjoint analysis is to determine what combination of a limited number of attributes is most influential on respondent choice or decision making. A controlled set of potential products or services is shown to survey respondents and by analyzing how they make preferences between these products, the implicit valuation of the individual elements making up the product or service can be determined. These implicit valuations (utilities or part-worths) can be used to create market models that estimate market share, revenue and even profitability of new designs.
Conjoint originated in mathematical psychology and was developed by marketing professor Paul E. Green at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and Data Chan. Other prominent conjoint analysis pioneers include professor V. ‘Seenu’ Srinivasan of Stanford University who developed a linear programming (LINMAP) procedure for rank ordered data as well as a self-explicated approach, Richard Johnson who developed the Adaptive Conjoint Analysis technique in the 1980s and Jordan Louviere (University of Iowa) who invented and developed choice-based approaches to conjoint analysis and related techniques such as best-worst scaling.
Today it is used in many of the social sciences and applied sciences including marketing, product management, and operations research. It is used frequently in testing customer acceptance of new product designs, in assessing the appeal of advertisements and in service design. It has been used in product positioning, but there are some who raise problems with this application of conjoint analysis.
Conjoint analysis techniques may also be referred to as multiattribute compositional modelling, discrete choice modelling, or stated preference research, and is part of a broader set of trade-off analysis tools used for systematic analysis of decisions. These tools include Brand-Price Trade-Off, Simalto, and mathematical approaches such as AHP, evolutionary algorithms or rule-developing experimentation.
What Is Conjoint Analysis?

Robust Variable Step Size – Fractional Least Mean Square (RVSS-FLMS)
In this paper, we propose an adaptive framework for the variable step size of the fractional least mean square (FLMS) algorithm. The proposed algorithm named the robust variable step size-FLMS (RVSS-FLMS), dynamically updates the step size of the FLMS to achieve high convergence rate with low steady state error. For the evaluation purpose, the problem of system identification is considered. The experiments clearly show that the proposed approach achieves better convergence rate compared to the FLMS and adaptive step-size modified FLMS (AMFLMS). …

Synthesis of Compact and Accurate Neural Network (SCANN)
Artificial neural networks (ANNs) have become the driving force behind recent artificial intelligence (AI) research. An important problem with implementing a neural network is the design of its architecture. Typically, such an architecture is obtained manually by exploring its hyperparameter space and kept fixed during training. This approach is both time-consuming and inefficient. Furthermore, modern neural networks often contain millions of parameters, whereas many applications require small inference models. Also, while ANNs have found great success in big-data applications, there is also significant interest in using ANNs for medium- and small-data applications that can be run on energy-constrained edge devices. To address these challenges, we propose a neural network synthesis methodology (SCANN) that can generate very compact neural networks without loss in accuracy for small and medium-size datasets. We also use dimensionality reduction methods to reduce the feature size of the datasets, so as to alleviate the curse of dimensionality. Our final synthesis methodology consists of three steps: dataset dimensionality reduction, neural network compression in each layer, and neural network compression with SCANN. We evaluate SCANN on the medium-size MNIST dataset by comparing our synthesized neural networks to the well-known LeNet-5 baseline. Without any loss in accuracy, SCANN generates a $46.3\times$ smaller network than the LeNet-5 Caffe model. We also evaluate the efficiency of using dimensionality reduction alongside SCANN on nine small to medium-size datasets. Using this methodology enables us to reduce the number of connections in the network by up to $5078.7\times$ (geometric mean: $82.1\times$), with little to no drop in accuracy. We also show that our synthesis methodology yields neural networks that are much better at navigating the accuracy vs. energy efficiency space. …