UserDEV: A Mixed-Initiative System for User Group Analytics

The increasing availability of user data constitutes new opportunities in various applications ranging from behavioral analytics to recommendations. A common way of analyzing user data is through "user group analytics" whose purpose is to breakdown users into groups to gain a more focused understanding of their collective behavior. The process consists of group discovery, group exploration, and group visualization. To date, user group analytics is done using separate tools which makes it fragmented and burdensome for analysts. In this paper, we describe UserDEV, a full-fledged user group analytics pipeline which combines discovery, exploration, and visualization of user groups, in a fully-connected fashion. UserDEV contributes a star-like architecture as well as a common data exchange model to tighten connections between the analytics components. We provide a realistic use case to show how UserDEV helps analysts perform analytical tasks on user groups. While we report a preliminary user study, we also discuss opportunities for an end-to-end evaluation of a group analytics framework.