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We introduce methods from statistical learning theory to the field of conjoint analysis for preference modeling. We present a method for estimating preference models that can be highly nonlinear and robust to noise. Like recently developed polyhedral methods for conjoint analysis, our method is based on computationally efficient optimization techniques. We compare our method with standard logistic regression, hierarchical Bayes, and the polyhedral methods using standard, widely used simulation data. The experiments show that the proposed method handles noise significantly better than both logistic regression and the recent polyhedral methods and is never worse than the best method among the three mentioned above. It can also be used for estimating nonlinearities in preference models faster and better than all other methods. Finally, a simple extension for handling heterogeneity shows promising results relative to hierarchical Bayes. The proposed method can therefore be useful, for example, for analyzing large amounts of data that are noisy or for estimating interactions among product features.choice models, data mining, econometric models, hierarchical Bayes analysis, marketing tools, regression and other statistical techniques

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Amalthaea is an evolving, multiagent ecosystem for personalized ltering, discovery and monitoring of information sites. Amalthaea's primary application domain is the World-Wide-Web and its main purpose is to assist its users in nding interesting information. Two di erent categories of agents are introduced in the system: ltering agents that model and monitor the interests of the user and discovery agents that model the information sources. A market-like ecosystem where the agents evolve, compete and collaborate is presented: agents that are usefull to the user or other agents reproduce while low-performing agents are destroyed. Results from various experiments with di erent system con gurations and varying ratios of user interests vs agents in the system are presented. Finally issues like ne-tuning the initial parameters of the system and establishing and maintaining equilibria in the ecosystem are discussed.

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