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Finding Similar People to Guide Life Choices: Challenge, Design, and Evaluation

Published: 02 May 2017 Publication History

Abstract

People often seek examples of similar individuals to guide their own life choices. For example, students making academic plans refer to friends; patients refer to acquaintances with similar conditions, physicians mention past cases seen in their practice. How would they want to search for similar people in databases? We discuss the challenge of finding similar people to guide life choices and report on a need analysis based on 13 interviews. Our PeerFinder prototype enables users to find records that are similar to a seed record, using both record attributes and temporal events found in the records. A user study with 18 participants and four experts shows that users are more engaged and more confident about the value of the results to provide useful evidence to guide life choices when provided with more control over the search process and more context for the results, even at the cost of added complexity.

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    CHI '17: Proceedings of the 2017 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
    May 2017
    7138 pages
    ISBN:9781450346559
    DOI:10.1145/3025453
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    Published: 02 May 2017

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    1. decision making
    2. similarity
    3. temporal event analytics
    4. temporal visualization
    5. visual analytics

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    CHI '17 Paper Acceptance Rate 600 of 2,400 submissions, 25%;
    Overall Acceptance Rate 6,199 of 26,314 submissions, 24%

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    • (2022)A Novel Patient Similarity Network (PSN) Framework Based on Multi-Model Deep Learning for Precision MedicineJournal of Personalized Medicine10.3390/jpm1205076812:5(768)Online publication date: 10-May-2022
    • (2022)Applications of dynamic hypergraph visualizationProceedings of the 2022 International Conference on Advanced Visual Interfaces10.1145/3531073.3534495(1-3)Online publication date: 6-Jun-2022
    • (2022)Survey on Visual Analysis of Event Sequence DataIEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics10.1109/TVCG.2021.310041328:12(5091-5112)Online publication date: 1-Dec-2022
    • (2022)Interactive similar patient retrieval for visual summary of patient outcomesJournal of Visualization10.1007/s12650-022-00898-926:3(577-592)Online publication date: 22-Nov-2022
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