Tabular Foundation Models for Discrete Choice Estimation

Liu Liu and Dan Zhang

Papers from arXiv.org

Abstract: Tabular foundation models (TFMs) generate predictions on structured data via in-context learning, without task-specific estimation. We ask whether TFMs can be effectively applied to discrete choice, a central demand estimation framework in marketing and operations, and find that directly applying TFMs yields limited performance. The gap is structural: TFMs assume row-independent observations, whereas discrete choice is inherently set-valued and subject to persistent consumer preference heterogeneity. We propose a reformulation that encodes both choice-set dependence and individual heterogeneity within a row-based learning framework. Evaluated on a yogurt scanner panel, individual-level heterogeneity encoding is the dominant driver of predictive accuracy. The best reformulation outperforms hierarchical Bayesian estimation on both holdout log-likelihood and hit rate, running 16 times faster, a practical advantage for large-scale demand estimation. The advantage is largest in the medium-data regime (10--40 purchase occasions per consumer), where parametric Bayesian shrinkage most distorts estimates for atypical consumers. Fine-tuning on population choice data provides additional gains for consumers with shallow purchase histories, where in-context learning has limited individual-specific signal to condition on. These results establish a principled approach for applying foundation models to consumer choice problems more broadly.

Date: 2026-07, Revised 2026-07
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