Dea-Viz: A Software for Visualization of Data Envelopment Analysis Problems

Abstract

Visualization of data envelopment analysis (DEA) problems can be a very informative step in order to get insight into the problems and their characteristics. Through the various visualization methods, one can literally look at the DEA problem and the related data from different perspectives. Doing so would help to efficiently identify possible regularities and patterns, as well as irregularities and anomalies in the data.

Despite its importance and benefits, visualization is vastly neglected in the DEA applications. Even though there are several suggested methods for DEA visualization in the literature, the graphical investigation step is absent in the majority of the studies. The reason may lie in the fact that the DEA software packages severely lack any high-dimensional visualization features.

This paper is an introduction to DEA-Viz, a new DEA software which is mainly focused on visualization of the DEA problems. The software is a free-to-use cloud-based applet that can shed light onto a DEA problem using various visualization methods, and thus from various aspects. The intuitive design of the DEA-Viz helps researchers to generate diverse plots of their datasets, in order to gain insight into the problems and augment the quantitative analysis.

Keywords: Data Envelopment Analysis, Data Visualization, Anomaly Detection, Software