Sampling of Alternatives for Route Choice Modeling

This paper presents a new paradigm for choice set generation in the context of route choice model estimation. We assume that the choice sets contain all paths connecting each origin-destination pair. Although this is behaviorally questionable, we make this assumption in order to avoid bias in the econometric model. These sets are in general impossible to generate explicitly. Therefore, we propose an importance sampling approach to generate subsets of paths suitable for model estimation. Using only a subset of alternatives requires the path utilities to be corrected according to the sampling protocol in order to obtain unbiased parameter estimates. We derive such a sampling correction for the proposed algorithm.