Data Analysis Tool to Assess Value of Information for Decision-making (DATAVOID)

Decision-makers within the federal government and other agencies are responsible for making mission-critical decisions where a poor choice can have disastrous consequences, from monetary cost to loss of human life. To make the optimal decision, decision-makers often require detailed knowledge of the current scenario. Because information is often hard to obtain and time is limited, decision-makers must quickly prioritize which information to gather and analyze. To address this challenge, under a Phase I effort, we designed a Data Analysis Tool to Assess Value of Information for Decision-Making (DATAVOID). DATAVOID’s user interface enables decision-makers to formalize their decision-making process to optimize prioritized information requirements by probabilistically assessing the Value of Information (VoI) for any given piece of data. Under the Phase II effort, we plan to extend develop a full scope DATAVOID system which efficiently computes VoI and presents information collection strategy recommendations for a wide class of decision making scenarios including multi-criteria decision making.