Policy analytics : an agenda for research and practice

Belton, Valerie and Lucertini, Giulia and Montibeller, Gilberto and Tsoukias, Alexis (2014) Policy analytics : an agenda for research and practice. In: The Operational Research Society Annual Conference, 2014-09-09 - 2014-09-11, Royal Holloway, University of London.

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Abstract

The growing impact of the ‘‘analytics’’ perspective in recent years, which integrates advanced data-mining and learning methods, is often associated with increasing access to large databases and with decision support systems. Since its origin, the field of analytics has been strongly business-oriented, with a typical focus on data-driven decision processes. In public decisions, however, issues such as individual and social values, culture and public engagement are more important and, to a large extent, characterise the policy cycle of design, testing, implementation, evaluation and review of public policies. Therefore public policy making seems to be a much more socially complex process than has hitherto been considered by most analytics methods and applications. In this paper, we thus suggest a framework for the use of analytics in supporting the policy cycle—and conceptualise it as ‘‘Policy Analytics’’.

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