Representative methods of computational socioeconomics

Abstract

Abstract The increasing availability of data sources and analysis tools borrowed from computer science and physical science have sharply changed traditional methodologies of social sciences, leading to a new branch named computational socioeconomics, which studies various phenomena in socioeconomic development by using quantitative methods based on large-scale real-world data. Sited on recent publications, this perspective will introduce three representative methods: (i) natural data analyses, (ii) large-scale online experiments, and (iii) integration of big data and surveys. This perspective ends up with in-depth discussion on the limitations and challenges of the above-mentioned emerging methods.