Augmenting Visualizations with Predictive and Investigative Insights to Facilitate Decision Making

Abstract

Many people find it difficult to comprehend basic charts on the web, let alone make effective decisions from them. To address this gap, several ML models aim to automatically detect useful insights from charts and narrate them in a simpler textual format. However, most of these solutions can only detect basic factual insights (a.k.a. descriptive insights) that are already present in the chart, which may help with chart comprehension, but not decision-making. In this work, we study whether more advanced predictive and investigative insights can help users understand what will happen next and what actions they should take. These advanced insights can help decision-makers better understand the reasons behind anomaly events, predict future unfolding trends, and recommend possible actions for optimizing business outcomes. Through a study with 18 participants, we found that predictive and investigative insights lead to more insights recorded by users on average and better effectiveness ratings.