# 301: Itinerary Choice using MNL¶

This example is an itinerary choice model built using the example itinerary choice dataset included with Larch. As usual, we first create the DB objects:

d = larch.DB.Example('AIR')


Now let’s make our model. We’ll use a few variables to define our linear-in-parameters utility function.

m = larch.Model(d)

vars = [
"timeperiod=2",
"timeperiod=3",
"timeperiod=4",
"timeperiod=5",
"timeperiod=6",
"timeperiod=7",
"timeperiod=8",
"timeperiod=9",
"carrier=2",
"carrier=3",
"carrier=4",
"carrier=5",
"equipment=2",
"fare_hy",
"fare_ly",
"elapsed_time",
"nb_cnxs",
]


The larch.roles module defines a few convenient classes for declaring data and parameter. One we will use here is PX which creates a linear-in-parameter term that represents one data element (a column from our data, or an expression that can be evaluated on the data alone) multiplied by a parameter with the same name.

from larch.roles import PX
m.utility.ca = sum(PX(i) for i in vars)


The one line of code above is equivalent to writing:

m.utility.ca = P("tp2") * X("tp2") + P("tp3") * X("tp3") + ...


but obviously much simpler to write and maintain.

Since we are estimating just an MNL model in this example, this is all we need to do to build our model, and we’re ready to go. To estimate the likelihood maximizing parameters, we give:

>>> result = m.maximize_loglike()
>>> result.message
'Optimization terminated successfully per computed tolerance. [bhhh]'

>>> print(m.report('txt', sigfigs=3))
============================================================================================...
Model Parameter Estimates
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------...
Parameter       InitValue       FinalValue      StdError        t-Stat          NullValue
timeperiod=2     0.0             0.0959          0.00948         10.1            0.0
timeperiod=3     0.0             0.126           0.00953         13.3            0.0
timeperiod=4     0.0             0.0605          0.00978         6.19            0.0
timeperiod=5     0.0             0.141           0.00973         14.5            0.0
timeperiod=6     0.0             0.238           0.00973         24.5            0.0
timeperiod=7     0.0             0.351           0.00996         35.3            0.0
timeperiod=8     0.0             0.353           0.0105          33.8            0.0
timeperiod=9     0.0            -0.0104          0.011          -0.945           0.0
carrier=2        0.0             0.117           0.00869         13.5            0.0
carrier=3        0.0             0.639           0.00813         78.6            0.0
carrier=4        0.0             0.565           0.0176          32.2            0.0
carrier=5        0.0            -0.624           0.013          -48.2            0.0
equipment=2      0.0             0.466           0.00931         50.1            0.0
fare_hy          0.0            -0.00117         2.83e-05       -41.5            0.0
fare_ly          0.0            -0.00118         8.51e-05       -13.8            0.0
elapsed_time     0.0            -0.00609         0.000111       -54.6            0.0
nb_cnxs          0.0            -2.95            0.0254         -1.16e+02        0.0
============================================================================================...
Model Estimation Statistics
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------...
Log Likelihood at Convergence           -777770.07
Log Likelihood at Null Parameters       -953940.44
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------...
Rho Squared w.r.t. Null Parameters      0.185
============================================================================================...


Tip

m = larch.Model.Example(301)