PhD ceremony Mr. A.H.J. Broeksema: The Decision Exploration Lab - Supporting the business analyst in understanding automated decisions

PhD ceremony: Mr. A.H.J. Broeksema

Dissertation: The Decision Exploration Lab - Supporting the business analyst in understanding automated decisions

Promotor(s): prof. A.C. Telea, prof. G. Melancon

Faculty: Mathematics and Natural Sciences

Decision Management Systems (DMS) provide means to model and automate enterprise decisions and are applied in a wide range of industries, among which health care, commerce, insurance, finance and transportation. These systems make millions of decisions each day without direct human supervision, impacting the life of millions of people and impacting economies at a large scale. The multiplicative effect of decision automation provides the opportunity to fine-tune the decision system. By analyzing its global and emerging properties rather than focusing on the details of each decision, the system as a whole can be better adapted to the reality it models. These systems store a wealth of information related to the structure and functioning of a DMS. In this thesis various ways are explored to visualize and analyze this data in order to help a business user to gain a deeper understanding of automated decisions.

We present a visual analytics system, the Decision Exploration Lab (DEL). It provides business users with an interactive visual analysis environment to understand the aggregated effects of automated decisions. We evaluated our approach with two use case scenarios from the car insurance industry.