Time-Varying Transition Probability Matrix Estimation and Its Application to Brand Share Analysis

PLoS One. 2017 Jan 11;12(1):e0169981. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0169981. eCollection 2017.

Abstract

In a product market or stock market, different products or stocks compete for the same consumers or purchasers. We propose a method to estimate the time-varying transition matrix of the product share using a multivariate time series of the product share. The method is based on the assumption that each of the observed time series of shares is a stationary distribution of the underlying Markov processes characterized by transition probability matrices. We estimate transition probability matrices for every observation under natural assumptions. We demonstrate, on a real-world dataset of the share of automobiles, that the proposed method can find intrinsic transition of shares. The resulting transition matrices reveal interesting phenomena, for example, the change in flows between TOYOTA group and GM group for the fiscal year where TOYOTA group's sales beat GM's sales, which is a reasonable scenario.

MeSH terms

  • Algorithms*
  • Automobiles* / economics
  • Automobiles* / statistics & numerical data
  • Commerce / statistics & numerical data*
  • Consumer Behavior / statistics & numerical data*
  • Humans
  • Markov Chains
  • Probability
  • Statistics as Topic / methods*
  • Time Factors

Grants and funding

This work was supported by JSPS KAKENHI Grant Numbers 25120009, 25120011, and 16K16108. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.