Incorporating uncertainty into decision-making: An information visualisation approach

Abstract

Incorporating uncertainty into the decision-making process and exposing its effects are crucial for making informed decisions and maximizing the benefits attained from such decisions. Yet, the explicit incorporation of uncertainty into decision-making poses significant cognitive challenges. The decisionmaker could be overloaded, and thus may not effectively take the advantages of the uncertainty information. In this paper, we present an information visualisation approach, called RiDeViz, to facilitate the incorporation of uncertainty into decision-making. The main intention of RiDeViz is to enable the decision-maker to explore and analyse the uncertainty and its effects at different levels of detail. It is also intended to enable the decision-maker to explore cause and effect relationships and experiment with multiple “what-if” scenarios. We demonstrate the utility of RiDeViz through an application example of a financial decision-making scenario.