TLS - Applied Visual Analytics for Economic Decision-Making

Purdue University, West Lafayette IN

Investigators

Abstract

Scientists have discovered that individuals are often unable to make optimal decisions when problems are complex due to limitations on cognitive abilities. This interdisciplinary project employs visual analytics as a transformational analytical tool in economics. The investigators use visual analytics to improve decision making and identify key motivations in knowledge creation in various economic problems. The project?s suite of tools allows users to interactively explore datasets and decision spaces as well as compare alternate hypothesis and develop new hypothesis. Further, keystrokes and information pertinent to understanding decision-making and knowledge generation are recorded, allowing the investigators to make predictions about the decision-making process on a broad scale and providing guidance for theoretical models of decision-making. This is the first thorough investigation of the value of visual analytics for economic decision-making. Intellectual Merit This project brings together a team of scientists from economics, electrical and computer engineering and cognitive science, fields that are rarely linked. The fundamental objective of this three-year project is to improve individual and group economic decision making through the introduction of visual analytics as a necessary tool for dealing with complex information sets. The project?s second objective is to quantify the effectiveness of visual analytics for decision making. Visual analytics has emerged as an important approach to data analysis in many fields such as medicine, business, and the physical sciences, and the investigators are the first to quantify its value for decision-making using rigorous experimental methods. The final objective is to develop a unique suite of visual analytics tools to help economists and policy-makers analyze large datasets. Broader Impact: The use of visual analytics for economic decision-making is extremely beneficial to policy makers. Use of these tools should have an immediate and positive impact on the capacity to analyze complex economic datasets. These tools can also be used in many fields with problems in analytical reasoning. The visual analytics tools that result at the completion of the project will be made available online for classroom use, which will have a broad impact on education. Visual analytics tools are unique in that they are both simple enough and captivating for K-12 students, while also being helpful to students at the undergraduate and graduate levels. The project will use over 650 undergraduate student subjects drawn from a large and diversified student population and will provide these students with important exposure to modern research methods. The VSEEL laboratory at Purdue has an excellent record of involving members of underrepresented minority groups at both the undergraduate and graduate levels and this project is expected to continue this tradition. Over 40 percent of these student subjects will be women and about one-third will be underrepresented minorities. Based on past experience, we expect that at least one-half of the Ph.D. student researchers will be women and/or minorities.