Ordinal Characterization of Similarity Judgments

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Victor, Jonathan D., Aguilar, Guillermo, Waraich, Suniyya A.
Format: Preprint
Published: 2023
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author Victor, Jonathan D.
Aguilar, Guillermo
Waraich, Suniyya A.
author_facet Victor, Jonathan D.
Aguilar, Guillermo
Waraich, Suniyya A.
contents Characterizing judgments of similarity within a perceptual or semantic domain, and making inferences about the underlying structure of this domain from these judgments, has an increasingly important role in cognitive and systems neuroscience. We present a new framework for this purpose that makes limited assumptions about how perceptual distances are converted into similarity judgments. The approach starts from a dataset of empirical judgments of relative similarities: the fraction of times that a subject chooses one of two comparison stimuli to be more similar to a reference stimulus. These empirical judgments provide Bayesian estimates of underling choice probabilities. From these estimates, we derive indices that characterize the set of judgments in three ways: compatibility with a symmetric dis-similarity, compatibility with an ultrametric space, and compatibility with an additive tree. Each of the indices is derived from rank-order relationships among the choice probabilities that, as we show, are necessary and sufficient for local consistency with the three respective characteristics. We illustrate this approach with simulations and example psychophysical datasets of dis-similarity judgments in several visual domains and provide code that implements the analyses at https://github.com/jvlab/simrank.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2310_07543
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Ordinal Characterization of Similarity Judgments
Victor, Jonathan D.
Aguilar, Guillermo
Waraich, Suniyya A.
Neurons and Cognition
Quantitative Methods
91E30 (Primary) 62P15, 92-08, 92-10, 51-08 (Secondary)
Characterizing judgments of similarity within a perceptual or semantic domain, and making inferences about the underlying structure of this domain from these judgments, has an increasingly important role in cognitive and systems neuroscience. We present a new framework for this purpose that makes limited assumptions about how perceptual distances are converted into similarity judgments. The approach starts from a dataset of empirical judgments of relative similarities: the fraction of times that a subject chooses one of two comparison stimuli to be more similar to a reference stimulus. These empirical judgments provide Bayesian estimates of underling choice probabilities. From these estimates, we derive indices that characterize the set of judgments in three ways: compatibility with a symmetric dis-similarity, compatibility with an ultrametric space, and compatibility with an additive tree. Each of the indices is derived from rank-order relationships among the choice probabilities that, as we show, are necessary and sufficient for local consistency with the three respective characteristics. We illustrate this approach with simulations and example psychophysical datasets of dis-similarity judgments in several visual domains and provide code that implements the analyses at https://github.com/jvlab/simrank.
title Ordinal Characterization of Similarity Judgments
topic Neurons and Cognition
Quantitative Methods
91E30 (Primary) 62P15, 92-08, 92-10, 51-08 (Secondary)
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.07543