TY - JOUR
T1 - The role of teamwork in the analysis of big data
T2 - A study of visual analytics and box office prediction
AU - Buchanan, Verica
AU - Lu, Yafeng
AU - McNeese, Nathan
AU - Steptoe, Michael
AU - Maciejewski, Ross
AU - Cooke, Nancy
N1 - Funding Information:
This work was supported in part by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security's VACCINE Center under Award No. 2009-ST-061-CI000 and the NSF under Grant No. 1350573.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2017, Mary Ann Liebert, Inc.
PY - 2017/3
Y1 - 2017/3
N2 - Historically, domains such as business intelligence would require a single analyst to engage with data, develop a model, answer operational questions, and predict future behaviors. However, as the problems and domains become more complex, organizations are employing teams of analysts to explore and model data to generate knowledge. Furthermore, given the rapid increase in data collection, organizations are struggling to develop practices for intelligence analysis in the era of big data. Currently, a variety of machine learning and data mining techniques are available to model data and to generate insights and predictions, and developments in the field of visual analytics have focused on how to effectively link data mining algorithms with interactive visuals to enable analysts to explore, understand, and interact with data and data models. Although studies have explored the role of single analysts in the visual analytics pipeline, little work has explored the role of teamwork and visual analytics in the analysis of big data. In this article, we present an experiment integrating statistical models, visual analytics techniques, and user experiments to study the role of teamwork in predictive analytics. We frame our experiment around the analysis of social media data for box office prediction problems and compare the prediction performance of teams, groups, and individuals. Our results indicate that a team's performance is mediated by the team's characteristics such as openness of individual members to others' positions and the type of planning that goes into the team's analysis. These findings have important implications for how organizations should create teams in order to make effective use of information from their analytic models.
AB - Historically, domains such as business intelligence would require a single analyst to engage with data, develop a model, answer operational questions, and predict future behaviors. However, as the problems and domains become more complex, organizations are employing teams of analysts to explore and model data to generate knowledge. Furthermore, given the rapid increase in data collection, organizations are struggling to develop practices for intelligence analysis in the era of big data. Currently, a variety of machine learning and data mining techniques are available to model data and to generate insights and predictions, and developments in the field of visual analytics have focused on how to effectively link data mining algorithms with interactive visuals to enable analysts to explore, understand, and interact with data and data models. Although studies have explored the role of single analysts in the visual analytics pipeline, little work has explored the role of teamwork and visual analytics in the analysis of big data. In this article, we present an experiment integrating statistical models, visual analytics techniques, and user experiments to study the role of teamwork in predictive analytics. We frame our experiment around the analysis of social media data for box office prediction problems and compare the prediction performance of teams, groups, and individuals. Our results indicate that a team's performance is mediated by the team's characteristics such as openness of individual members to others' positions and the type of planning that goes into the team's analysis. These findings have important implications for how organizations should create teams in order to make effective use of information from their analytic models.
KW - box office prediction
KW - cognitive analysis
KW - teamwork
KW - visual analytics
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U2 - 10.1089/big.2016.0044
DO - 10.1089/big.2016.0044
M3 - Article
C2 - 28282239
AN - SCOPUS:85016430412
SN - 2167-6461
VL - 5
SP - 53
EP - 66
JO - Big Data
JF - Big Data
IS - 1
ER -