Take-the-best heuristic

The heuristic has since been modified and applied to domains from medicine, artificial intelligence, and political forecasting.

In these situations, relying only on the best cue available may be a reasonable alternative that allows for fast, frugal, and accurate decisions.

The take-the-best heuristic entails three steps to make such an inference:[9] Search rule: Look through cues in the order of their validity.

This judgment or inference has to be based on information provided by binary cues, like "Is the city a state capital?".

The comparison task for a given pair (A,B) of German cities in the reference class, consisted in establishing which one has a larger population, based on nine cues.

Cues were binary-valued, such as whether the city is a state capital or whether it has a soccer team in the national league.

Mathematically this means that the cues found for the comparison allow a quasi-order isomorphism between the objects compared on the criterion, in this case cities with their populations, and their corresponding binary vectors.

One obvious measure for establishing the performance of an inference mechanism is determined by the percentage of correct judgements.

Furthermore, what matters most is not just the performance of the heuristic when fitting known data, but when generalizing from a known training set to new items.