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Algorithms from and for Nature and Life pp 147–154Cite as

Visualizing Data in Social and Behavioral Sciences: An Application of PARAMAP on Judicial Statistics

Part of the Studies in Classification, Data Analysis, and Knowledge Organization book series (STUDIES CLASS)

Abstract

In this paper, we describe a technique called PARAMAP for the visualization, scaling, and dimensionality reduction of data in the social and behavioral sciences. PARAMAP uses a criterion of maximizing continuity between higher dimensional data and lower dimensional derived data, rather than the distance based criterion used by standard distance based multidimensional scaling (MDS). We introduce PARAMAP using the example of scaling and visualizing the voting patterns of Justices in the US Supreme Court. We use data on the agreement rates between individual Justices in the US Supreme Court and on the percentage swing votes for Justices over time. We use PARAMAP, metric MDS, and nonmetric MDS approaches to create a voting space representation of the Justices in one and two dimensions. We test the results using a metric that measures neighborhood agreement of points between higher and lower dimensional solutions. PARAMAP produces smooth, easily interpretable, solutions, with no clumping together of points.

Keywords

  • Swing Voters
  • Agreement Rate
  • Voting Patterns
  • Lower Dimensional Solution
  • Individual Justice

These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

We dedicate this paper to our supervisor and mentor Professor J. Douglas Carroll, who sadly passed away in June, 2011.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Management, Bogazici University, Istanbul, Turkey

    Ulas Akkucuk

  2. Rutgers Business School, Newark and New Brunswick, Newark, NJ, USA

    J. Douglas Carroll

  3. Lubar School of Business, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Milwaukee, WI, USA

    Stephen L. France

Authors
  1. Ulas Akkucuk
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  2. J. Douglas Carroll
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  3. Stephen L. France
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Ulas Akkucuk .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Essex Department of Mathematical Sciences, Colchester, United Kingdom

    Berthold Lausen

  2. Ghent University Department of Marketing, Ghent, Belgium

    Dirk Van den Poel

  3. University of Marburg Databionics, FB 12, Marburg, Germany

    Alfred Ultsch

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Akkucuk, U., Carroll, J.D., France, S.L. (2013). Visualizing Data in Social and Behavioral Sciences: An Application of PARAMAP on Judicial Statistics. In: Lausen, B., Van den Poel, D., Ultsch, A. (eds) Algorithms from and for Nature and Life. Studies in Classification, Data Analysis, and Knowledge Organization. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-00035-0_14

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